


Loaded Bones

by Stealth_Noodle



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Bad Decisions, Bakurae Clusterfuck, Canon - Anime Dub, Canon - Manga, Dark Comedy, Dick Jokes, Gen, Implied Relationships, Isolation, Manipulation, Mid-Canon, Monster World, Possession, Post-Canon, Power Dynamics, Reincarnation Follies, Wordcount: 30.000-50.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-13
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2018-03-30 07:25:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 48,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3928030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stealth_Noodle/pseuds/Stealth_Noodle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Battle City, Bakura reclaims the Millennium Ring and finds himself unexpectedly in control of the evil spirit inside it. What follows is a long, strange week of Monster World, mind games, memory gaps, and terrible mistakes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Thief

**Author's Note:**

> This is (mostly) dub-based because Ridiculous English Stereotype Bakura amuses me, but I've incorporated so much from the manga that the canon here has gone a bit syncretic. This fic also overwrites both the manga's Ring-reclamation-on-the-blimp scene and the anime's wacky repossession-in-the-church scene. 
> 
> I'm following (very loosely, don't break out a calendar) the timeline that puts Battle City in 1997, so older tech ahoy! And I have set out to reuse every dumb power the anime assigned the Ring during Duelist Kingdom.

[Saturday]

Bakura had surely done worse things in his life, even if he hadn't been conscious for them. And it wasn't stealing, really, if the item in question belonged to him and was bound to come back on its own sooner or later. Besides, he had already tried asking, and both Yugis had been very unreasonable.

So it was with a relatively unruffled conscience that he tiptoed into Yugi's bedroom and conducted a brisk search of the dresser. Although Yugi and Joey were absorbed in a duel downstairs, there remained the risk that Téa or Tristan might notice Bakura's extended absence and come looking to make sure that he hadn't managed to injure himself in the loo.

The dresser proved fruitless. Frowning, he dropped to his knees and peered under the bed, where he discovered a stack of magazines that were probably Joey's fault. He blushed as he pushed them back into their hiding place, then turned his attention to Yugi's closet.

He groped blindly in a forest of leather until his fingers brushed what felt like a shoebox. Bakura withdrew it with care, his pulse racing at the metallic clinks that accompanied each motion, and found that the box was wrapped in a confusion of rubber bands that required some time to remove. He held his breath as he finally took off the lid.

There it lay, gleaming beneath the Rod and the Necklace: his Millennium Ring.

Almost reverently, he disentangled it from its fellow Items. The metal cooled his feverish nerves, and he caught himself humming as he slipped the Ring around his neck and under his shirt. The marrow-deep itch that had bothered him since he awoke after Battle City began to fade.

"Bakura?" Téa's voice carried up the stairwell and through the door. "Are you okay in there?"

He nearly tore down a pair of Yugi's trousers in his haste to return the shoebox. "Quite all right!" he called back, hoping she didn't notice that his voice came from not quite the direction of the toilet. "I'll be down in just a moment!

As he turned to leave, his gaze fell on the pile of rubber bands. Several snapped in his hands and left angry red marks; he hoped that Yugi hadn't made a game out of their number and placement. When the box looked more or less as he had found it, Bakura shoved it back amongst the shoes and stuffed the broken elastic scraps into his pockets.

He paused in the doorway to straighten his shirt, remembered just in time to pull his hair free of the Ring's plaited cord, and rejoined the others downstairs.

"Dark Magic Attack!" greeted him, followed by Joey's "Aw, man, not again!"

Nothing stirred within the Ring. As Bakura settled in cross-legged on the floor, Yugi and Joey congratulated each other on a game well-played. Téa deposited the communal pretzel bowl in his lap.

"You're just lucky Yugi isn't using his God Cards," Tristan said, prompting an indignant noise from Joey. "He'd kick your butt in a heartbeat with Ra on the field."

Joey leaned over to punch him in the arm. "What, are ya forgettin' who almost beat Ra?"

Téa rolled her eyes and reached for a pretzel. "Almost not passing out isn't the same as almost winning, Joey."

Further squabbling was forestalled when Yugi said, "Guys, there's no way I could play with the God Cards just for fun. They're way too important!"

"Yeah, definitely." Téa shifted, stretching her legs out in front of her. "Have you had any luck figuring out what to do with them?"

As Yugi's fringe leapt up, indicating that he had ceded the conversation to Yami, Bakura pretended to be engrossed in scraping the salt from a pretzel. Fairly or not, he hadn't felt entirely comfortable in the pharaoh's presence ever since he had pieced together enough second-hand scraps of Battle City to spell out, "Yami might have killed me to win." From his delirium he remembered nothing but the dragon, twin-jawed and yellow-eyed, gnashing its fangs as he pleaded for help until the spirit took his place.

The Ring warmed worrisomely against his chest.

Dropping Yugi's voice a brooding octave, Yami said, "Their role in unlocking my memories remains a mystery. For now, I can do nothing more than wait for the God Cards to reveal their secrets."

A familiar feeling passed over Bakura, a sense that his next blink might be drawn out for days. But instead of what normally followed―a breath out of sync, a sudden change of scenery, and a new stain on his shirt―he felt a curious mental thud, as if his mind were a window that had beguiled a speeding bird. 

He blinked again, cautiously, and found that he was still sitting on the floor of the game shop with a half-scraped pretzel in his hand. The contents of the bowl appeared undiminished.

"Perhaps that tablet at the museum is the key," Yami mused. Whilst the pharaoh did tend to repeat himself, Bakura supposed it was unlikely that the group had been carrying on the same conversation all afternoon.

He glanced at the clock, realized he had no basis of comparison, glanced again regardless, and felt an uncertain smile stretch across his face.

Another thump registered in his psyche, followed by a horribly familiar voice that went straight to his brain without bothering with his ears: "You traitorous worm of a host, what the hell are you doing?"

Bakura twitched and crushed the pretzel he was holding. "Er, did anyone else hear that?"

The answering facial expressions suggested not. 

"Are you sure you're okay?" Téa asked. "You look kind of flushed."

He hesitated only a moment before seizing the opportunity. "Come to think of it, I am feeling rather unwell. I should―" another thump, accompanied by swearing― "probably go home."

"Yeah, there's something going around at school," Tristan said. "You shoulda seen what Joey puked up last week."

Téa pulled a face. "That was his own fault. Three burgers and a milkshake on a bad stomach?"

"Don't forget the onion rings. Man, _those_ sure tasted better goin' down."

Yami's lightening-shaped streaks of hair flopped back into his fringe as Yugi slid back into control, adopting a painfully earnest expression. "Do you want one of us to walk you home, Bakura?"

"Trust me, ya do," Joey added. "You don't wanna be alone in the middle of the street when your guts start doin' the tango."

The thumping had given way to an ominous silence. "I'll be all right on my own," Bakura said quickly, passing the pretzel bowl to Téa and trying to will the tremors out of his hands. "It's not far. I'd feel quite silly with an escort."

"Well, okay, if you're sure." Yugi gave him an uncertain frown. "You'll call us if you need anything, right?"

"Of course. Thank you." As Bakura got to his feet, he tried to remember whether he had told them about his living arrangements. Probably not―Yugi, at least, wouldn't have let him return ill to an empty flat, and the spirit in the Ring had no reason to have shared the information, not after it missed the chance to set its original plans in motion. At the door, he paused just long to wave a cheerful good-bye before hurrying off, racing his footsteps against his heartbeats.

The Ring remained silent, aside from the quiet slapping of its pointers against his skin. Bakura hoped it didn't decide to embed itself in him again.

When he reached his building, he ran past the elevator and up the stairs to the sixth floor, ignoring both the stares of his fellow tenants and the stitch in his side. At the end of the hall, he fumbled to get his key in the lock. His palms were sweating as if he truly were feverish. At last the knob turned, and he slammed the door behind himself loudly enough to hurt his ears.

A moment later, the sound was echoed by a series of muted psychic thuds, which felt more like impatient knocks than full-on assaults. "Whatever you're doing," said the voice in his head, "you will stop it immediately."

He realized that his fists were clenched and slowly pried his fingernails out of his palms. The spirit in the Ring hadn't spoken to him since it lost to Yugi at Duelist Kingdom; Bakura knew that it had begun possessing him again only because he kept losing time and waking up in strange places. His brain lacked the resources to sort out how he felt about the resumption of communication.

The tapping continued. " _Now_ , host."

"Er, ah..." Bakura filled his lungs and set his shoulders. "No."

What should have been a mental bomb burst with all the destructive force of a soap bubble. As the voice in his head raged, he raised one hand in front of his face and wiggled each finger in turn. A small giddy noise escaped him.

"No," he said again, and the word left a sharp, sweet taste on his tongue. As he toed off his trainers, he learned two new compound swear words from the spirit.

Ignoring his mind's suggestions of how things might go pear-shaped, Bakura made his way to the sofa, folded his hands in his lap, and let his eyes rest on the blue numbers glowing on the video. His pulse slowed.

The spirit cursed him, his ancestors, and any descendants he might happen to have, down unto the tenth generation, before ending with "So enjoy this while you can. The moment I regain control of this vessel, I shall evict your worthless soul and feed it to the shadows."

"I don't think you can do that, actually." He was pleased by the mildness of his tone. "Otherwise, I expect you already would have." 

The spirit didn't respond, and he was left alone to tally the seconds in his head. After two hundred he was content to let the clock count for him.

He breathed easily.

At a quarter past four, Bakura realized that the parts of his body in contact with the cushions were going numb. He shifted and stretched, eyes still fixed rapturously on the clock, and said, "Isn't this delightful? An entire afternoon has gone by, and I can account for every minute of it! I think I'll try an evening next." When the voice in his head remained silent, he stretched again, careful not to strain his bad arm, and got to his feet. "I'm also of a mind to try baking something."

The kitchen offered up flour, eggs, sugar, chocolate, salt, and vanilla—all the makings of simple chocolate brownies. The cocoa powder was a bit old, a veteran of several moves, but it smelled fine. The baking pan had only a thin film of dust that quickly succumbed to a tea towel. Humming, Bakura pre-heated the oven and fairly tingled from the thrill of being able to plan ahead.

He had missed baking.

A little over a year ago, before the voice began whispering in his brain, Bakura had blacked out while preparing a soufflé and awakened near the bus station in a town he had never heard of and which turned out to be a prohibitively expensive ticket away from home. He had just resigned himself to hitchhiking when he found himself inside the station, his jeans scuffed and his fingernails dirty, with enough cash to cover both his fare and the purchase of a few meals. In retrospect, he supposed this was thoughtful, considering he had arrived back at his flat to discover an eviction notice on his door and extensive fire damage in his kitchen.

Subsequently he had restricted himself to ready meals and spent a week agonizing over whether to tell his father that he suffered from what a growing number of library books suggested were dissociative fugues.

Bakura hesitated with his hand on the bag of flour, bracing for the spirit's mockery; it seemed in too talkative a mood to let his brooding pass unremarked. To his surprise, the spirit didn't so much as sneer. He turned his attention to measuring and said, "You can't spy on everything I'm thinking now, can you?"

Scoffing registered in his brain. "Don't flatter yourself. You've never had an idea worth exploring."

This was a blatant lie; the spirit had browsed his memories like a delinquent in a comic book shop, reading full issues without paying and occasionally, with an unpleasant neurological tingle, dog-earing pages it wanted to come back to later. Whilst he expected its interest in all things Yugi Moto, Bakura wasn't certain why the spirit liked birthday parties and spotty recollections of _Mr Benn_.

As an experiment, he let his thoughts flutter through old fears and embarrassments, none of which elicited a response. He cracked an egg victoriously. "Well, then. From now on, if you want to know my opinions, you'll have to ask me."

"Don't hold your breath."

Bakura paused with the second egg pinched between his thumb and forefinger. That the spirit had passed so quickly from threats and tantrums to something almost like bantering disquieted him. He hurried the rest of the ingredients into the bowl in order to take out his confusion on the mixing process.

The spirit's grin, long and wry with spite, tugged at his mind. "Bit on edge, are we, host?"

An awkward motion lobbed batter over the worktop. Scowling, Bakura pressed his hand to the dull burn in his arm and said, "No, I am not on edge. I _can't_ be on edge, because you can't control me anymore, and I'm baking again and you can't make me stop, and you can't just steal my body and do whatever you please without so much as a by-your-leave, and I―" he needed to breathe― "I have _grievances_!"

His knuckles had gone white around the spoon. Making a conscious effort to relax, he deemed the batter mixed and poured it into the pan.

In the back of his mind, the spirit chuckled in a way that made his nape tense. "Well," it said in the tones of one resigned to salvaging entertainment as obnoxiously as possible, "at least this is more interesting than 'Oh, dear. It no longer appears to be Tuesday.'"

The falsetto was uncalled for. Bakura made a miffed noise and fed the pan into the oven.

" _Grievances_ ," the spirit mimicked, then let its voice fall back to its usual pitch. "Heh. Do you keep a list?" 

With a little more force than necessary, he twisted the knob on his kitchen timer to give himself thirty minutes. "I would scarcely know where to begin," he replied. "Let's see what I remember about Battle City." He ticked his points off on his left hand: "First, I remember my arm hurting so badly I couldn't even think. Then a dragon almost killed me, and then I had terrible nightmares. Then I woke up half-starved on top of a blimp." He rapped his still-folded joint. "Look, I didn't even need all my fingers."

When the spirit didn't reply, Bakura added, "And for weeks before that, I can't remember actually finishing a single homework assignment, though I suppose that doesn't matter much when the class seemed to have moved on to a new topic every time I attended school. I hope you were bothering to feed me."

Still no response. "And I'm failing algebra."

A low, lunatic laugh bubbled up in his brain. "When the world is covered by darkness, algebra will be irrelevant."

"How is _that_ supposed to make me feel better?" He sighed and leaned against the wall, realizing after a moment that he had instinctively cupped his hand over his injured arm. He tightened his grip and set his jaw. "And you won't be covering anything in darkness, or trying to kill my friends, or―or anything of that sort. I won't let you."

The spirit laughed louder, whereupon Bakura realized that, short of discarding the Ring, he had no idea how to shut it up. He wandered into the living room and lay face-down on the sofa, burying his face in the cushions in the vain hope that the padding would somehow muffle the noise inside his skull.

"You amuse me, host," the spirit said, almost amicably. "Surrender now and your suffering will be minimal."

Scowling, he reached behind his neck and pinched the knot in the Ring's cord, drawing it out of his shirt. Perhaps he could accustom himself to the itching in the same way that an amputee could adapt to the tingling of a phantom limb. Of course, amputees tended to be given very good drugs.

The telephone rang. In order of descending frequency, the list of people from whom Bakura received calls comprised his school administrators, his landlord, local law enforcement, the specialty shop from which he imported too many touches of home, telemarketers, his father, and people who had been attempting to reach someone else. That he had gone two weeks without the Ring eliminated the fear of the first three.

When he crossed the room and picked up the receiver, his father's voice greeted him over a buzz of chatter that, to Bakura's untrained ear, sounded like Spanish. Background shouting obscured his father's question, but Bakura knew the answer by rote: "Everything's fine."

"Good, good. Now, I hate to tell you this, but we're in something of a critical situation. No need to worry, mind you―it's all museum politics―but I'm afraid I simply can't fly in for your birthday."

Bakura was surprised that he still had any capacity for disappointment. He twisted the phone's coiled lead tight around his finger. "I understand."

"I wish it were otherwise, but a priceless Incan collection is at stake. My work here is too important to postpone." And other things, by implication, were not. "I'll make it up to you at Christmas."

He had missed the last Christmas, which was just as well. On the morning of the twenty-fifth, Bakura had woken up knackered and found on his dresser a makeshift nativity scene populated with Monster World miniatures. 

"I'll be there this time," said his father, and Bakura realized that he hadn't yet responded. "I promise."

Bakura swallowed. "Then I'll look forward to seeing you."

An engine rumbled in the background. Someone called his father's name. "Sorry, my shuttle's here. I've posted your present. Take care."

"Take care," Bakura echoed, and the line went dead.

He held the receiver against his ear until it began to beep at him. As he replaced the phone in its cradle, the voice in his head sneered, "How pitiful."

"Don't." The wall was nearer than any furniture, so Bakura leaned against it as he stared at his feet. His folded arms pressed the Ring into his torso.

To his surprise, the spirit didn't persist in mocking him. An automatic "thank you" nearly escaped his mouth before he caught it. Willing his arms to relax, he glanced up from the floor and saw himself sprawled supine on the sofa.

Not quite on, he realized―his doppelgänger was translucent and poked through the cushions in the places where it didn't bother emulating the laws of physics. A copy of the Ring rested on its chest, the brilliant gold dimmed by the pattern of the sofa showing through.

The specter grinned, and Bakura saw that it was not a perfect double, unless the afternoon's baking had somehow twisted his facial features and done unexpectedly exciting things to his hair. A tuft shaped like a bat wing stabbed insubstantially through the armrest.

He contrived to sound unruffled: "You've got my hair wrong." There being no direction in which he wished the conversation to continue, he retreated to the kitchen and the soothing promise of tea. The beeping of the kitchen timer intercepted him.

"That's not food." 

The voice came from behind Bakura rather than from inside his head, startling him into fumbling the pan. By luck it landed on the hob instead of his feet.

"I rather think it is," he replied stiffly. He used his oven mitt to nudge his baked goods into a more secure position.

When he didn't turn to face the spirit, it darted in front of him, intersecting the oven with its torso, and hitched up its copy of his shirt. "This body is already soft and weak," it snapped, jabbing a finger at its exposed ribs. "Don't make it fat as well."

Bakura gaped at it, sputtered, and finally threw the oven mitt through its face before storming off to fill the kettle. When he returned, he made a point of igniting the ring in the middle of the spirit's stomach. A translucent stripe in its shirt sliced the little blue flames in half.

"I preferred it when you ignored me." He reconsidered almost as soon as the sentence was out of his mouth. "Prefer" was too strong a word to apply to the sensation of being shrugged on and off like a winter coat. 

Before he could amend his statement, the spirit vanished. He blinked at the space where it had been.

"Very good, then," he said, and took his tea and brownie in peace. He pointedly had seconds.

In the back of his mind, Bakura could still sense the spirit, spread like a thick balm over the places that had ached ever since he woke up without the Ring. The painkillers that left him fuzzy-headed and scarcely aware of his own skin had done nothing to diminish that discomfort; on his first night back in his flat, he had slathered an entire tube of analgesic cream over his arm before realizing that his pain was too inscrutably diffuse to blame entirely on the injury. He felt a bit like a drug addict.

He refused to wonder what he'd be feeling if the spirit had been able to regain control. Instead he made himself a sandwich, ate a third brownie, and decided to leave the kitchen before he made himself ill. The voice in his head remained silent, even when he stopped in the doorway and stared at his living room, curling his fingers around the Ring.

The evening stretched out before him like a sunlit sea, all silver surfaces and black depths. Not long ago Bakura had made a mental list of the things he wanted to do if-when-if his body was his own again, but the rawness that followed him home from Battle City had seized priority. Now that he couldn't very well run back to Yugi's and announce he was feeling much better for reasons he didn't want to disclose, he supposed he might as well get a start on dealing with the guilt.

* * *

Guilt lived in his flat's spare room, in foam-lined cases.

He had meant to do something about it sooner, he reminded himself as he weaved between his work table and his elaborate game board. Bakura always meant to do things; it wasn't his fault the Ring liked to break his promises.

Setting his jaw, he picked up one of the larger boxes and staggered with it over to his work table. It was best to prepare everything now, he told himself, so that he couldn't back down later. He held his breath as he parted the cardboard flaps and confirmed that he'd got the right box. 

"What's all this about?" asked the voice in his head.

He felt a curious flush of triumph, mingled with relief; the spirit had broken first and after scarcely an hour. After what he hoped came across as a meaningful pause, he replied, "I'm putting them back."

The spirit snorted. "Don't be daft, host. You don't know the first thing about moving souls."

"If I can't figure it out, I'll—I'll ask Yugi. Either way, they're all going back."

A patch of pale, shifting color interfered with his peripheral vision. When Bakura opened the topmost metal case in the box, revealing two rows of figurines set in foam lining, the spirit's hand splayed over them. "So ungrateful," the spirit murmured. "I gave you what you wanted."

"I wanted _friends_." He didn't add that he felt sick whenever he couldn't remember all of their names, nor that he had a recurring nightmare in which the Ring arrived a few years earlier and somehow intercepted the souls of his mother and sister. The worst part of the latter was waking up in a haze of nearly equal parts horror and longing.

As he set the case carefully on the table, the spirit tutted at him. "If Pegasus hadn't had such miserable timing, we'd have both got what we wanted months ago."

Bakura dug his nails into his palms. The spirit's original scheme, conveyed with cruel glee, had involved treating certain of his new classmates as it had just professed to treating the old. Denying him his flesh but not his consciousness, it had made him a captive audience for its improvisational planning process when Duelist Kingdom threw a spanner in its works. By the time the ship docked, he had given up protesting; all it ever got him were blackouts. He couldn't credit courage for telling Yugi to attack him on the battlefield.

In an effort to work the twist out of his stomach, he opened the next case, from which the face of his former gym teacher stared up grimly at him. Though the spirit no longer deigned to manifest, he could feel its smirk tugging at the sides of his mind: "You can't tell me you didn't want that one."

Refusing to take the bait, he picked up the next case of indwelt figurines and wished that their warmth were a figment of his imagination. Bad enough, he thought, that their eyes were detailed far more finely than he could ever hope to manage with a brush and a magnifying lens.

He had never wanted any of it; perhaps all he had to do was convince the Ring of as much. Once he had arranged and opened all the cases, he waved the Ring over them, thinking ungrateful thoughts, then tried flicking the pointers at the figurines. He suspected his time would have been more productively spent asking the tide not to come in.

When he turned, sighing, to make sure he hadn't missed anything in the box, the spirit appeared in the corner of his vision. Bakura frowned as it postured in front of the little prisons it had created, its head cocked and its copy of the Ring glittering around its neck. It ran an intangible finger through one of the cases.

"If you really don't like your presents, host," it drawled, "you need only say so. I could easily return them."

He stubbed his finger on a chunk of terrain. After a calming breath, he replied, "No." Politeness tacked on a perfunctory "thank you." Removing his hand from the box, he added, "I'd rather ask Yugi."

"No, you wouldn't."

He wanted to protest, but just as every blackout had made it harder to imagine sharing his fears with his father, every vivid-eyed miniature represented another question that Bakura didn't want to answer. The worst part would be explaining the lack of dust on even the older figurines.

"And you do realize that it isn't _Yugi_ you'd be asking."

He stilled.

"It wouldn't take but a moment," the spirit continued nonchalantly, "but it perhaps you'd rather drag the pharaoh into our affairs."

The other option was to dig a hole and bury the lot of them, but Bakura hurried that thought away before he could be accused of entertaining it. The unused shame attached itself to his fear of a spirit that was, in point of fact, at his mercy. 

"You'd better not try anything funny," he said, and failed to sound authoritative. The spirit's eyes gleamed as its projection winked out.

An awkward moment later, he realized that he had no idea how to cede control. The spirit cut off his halting questions: "Your soul room, host."

"Oh," he said, unenlightened. He closed his eyes and fidgeted.

Every other time he had visited his soul room, the spirit had put him there. He could remember his first exploration of it, how he puzzled over his mind's disjointed symbolism as the Ring's disembodied voice prattled around him. He recalled the second-hand sensations of the outside world, the sharpness of immediate reality when the spirit granted him a moment of control, and a pale door, left slightly ajar, which he was forbidden to touch on pain of unconsciousness...

Bakura focused on the image of the door. Something inside him trembled and detached, as if he were nodding off, and suddenly plush carpet filled the space beneath his palms. "There," he said, sliding his eyes open, "now, you promised―"

The door slammed shut. A demand for unconsciousness hit the back of his head like a brick, but to his surprise he remained awake.

The blank wall of his soul room rippled and shimmered. A moment later it melted into a window, as it had done when the spirit used to leave him conscious during its takeovers. Through it he watched his stolen fingers curl around the Ring and heard his darkened voice split the air with laughter. 

"How dare you!" he shouted. The walls swallowed the echoes. "You promised!"

Shoving aside the question of what else he should have expected, he closed his eyes and focused again on the idea of his soul room door. When that didn't work, he envisioned the spirit hurled bodily through it. The image was cathartic but otherwise unhelpful.

Gritting his teeth, he threw himself at the door, expecting to batter it ineffectually with his fists, and yelped in shock when it swung open. Arms whirling, he managed to catch hold of the jamb as his legs tried to spill him out into a black void beyond.

This was new.

As his vision adjusted, Bakura saw that what lay beyond his door was not a void but a dark hallway. A little light fell on the floor immediately outside, just enough to discern the junction of the walls and to determine that the passage was narrow and curved. If he concentrated, he could make out the impression of a gap in the wall on the right.

He probed with his foot and found the floor solid. The hand he sent to investigate the wall reported cold stone. Without giving himself time to second-guess, he pushed off into the hall and ran for the gap. 

A flash of light later, he felt the Ring in his hands, breathed in the scent of the boxes, and trembled from a dizzying fusion of relief and rage.

Inside his head, the spirit made an irritated noise. "Paranoid, aren't we? How do you expect me to release those souls if I'm not in control?"

Bakura bristled. "You tried to knock me out! I felt it!"

"Only to keep you quiet. I can't bloody concentrate with your blathering."

"You're _lying_." To his chagrin, he sounded all of four years old. "I can't believe I trusted you."

The spirit faded into visibility in front of him, its shirt askew and its hair wild, as if it had been subjected to a vigorous psychic shaking. Its eyes glittered as its tongue flicked over its lips. "Well, if that's how you feel," it asked with a hiss, "what are you going to do about it?"

Bakura strode across the room and opened the window. 

The spirit's manifestation tensed, not with terror or rage but with a palpable curiosity, as if this were the most interesting thing he had done all day. 

Biting his lip, he fumbled with the knot on the Ring's cord and tried not to think about why he didn't just pull the thing off over his head. He tried even harder not to think about how he'd felt until just a few hours ago, how the gnawing emptiness had lingered long after he gorged himself in the blimp's kitchen. A week after Battle City ended, he had stopped pretending that ridding himself of the spirit was anything like excising a tumor. 

He wondered if cancer patients ever suffered from separation anxiety, if the terror of loss could be worse than that of metastasis. It occurred to him that he probably wasn't sane.

He released the cord, letting the Ring fall back against his chest, and closed the window. "Don't ever do that again."

The spirit laughed, long and loud and all along the chromatic scale, before falling silent. When it showed no signs of speaking again, Bakura wandered into the kitchen for another brownie and a cup of tea, which he took along with his herbal supplement. His ceiling squeaked as the tenants above him lumbered their way towards bed.

An hour later, having drunk as much tea as he usefully could, Bakura tried to do the same.

As he lay on his back, failing to sleep, his shifting drew muted chimes from the Ring beside him on the pillow. The spirit appeared at the edge of his vision, wearing his green tartan pajamas and looking somewhat more ghostly than usual in the faint light seeping through the curtains. It crouched at his bedside.

He gave it a wary look. "What do you want?"

"The rest of the Millennium Items, and the pharaoh screaming for mercy as I eviscerate him with my teeth."

"That's completely horrible. And those are _my_ teeth."

Light pollution glowed through the spirit's grin. "Were you asking in general, or just at the moment?"

With a long sigh, Bakura pushed the Ring aside to the mattress and buried his head under his pillow. "I'm sorry I asked at all."

When he heard the spirit's voice again, it was so near his ear that he was disturbed not to feel breath. "You know," it crooned, "that I have never meant you harm." Perhaps it had forgotten threatening him earlier in the day. "Sleep tight, host. I'll prey on your nightmares."

Sleep came loose and fitful, and only after he was too knackered to entertain the dread that the spirit might attempt a lullaby.

* * *

[Sunday]

He floated into wakefulness as sunlight saturated his curtains. Yawning, Bakura debated having a lie-in, ruled that the negative side had no arguments worth considering, and brought his knuckles up to rub the crust from his eyes.

When his eyelids parted, he found the spirit perched on the foot of his bed, staring at him.

"Blimey!" He bolted upright, yanking his blankets through the spirit's legs and briefly choking himself as the Ring's cord caught on the edge of the pillow. The spirit didn't stir.

As his heart rate fluttered back to its baseline, Bakura tilted into a better sitting position and released his death-grip on the sheets. He tugged his right sleeve until his pajamas sat less askew on his shoulders.

He blinked at the spirit. It did not blink back. In his Sunday-morning stupor, he found that it put him in mind of a disaffected goldfish.

After waiting a moment to see if the spirit intended to explain itself, he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and set about his morning routine. To his relief, the spirit's manifestation appeared not to follow. It was one thing to have peripheral awareness of another consciousness in his head, and quite another to have that consciousness leer at him in the loo.

For his sanity's sake, he relieved himself with his eyes shut. 

As he washed his hands, a vague sense of unease made him glance up at the mirror. A moment's study revealed that his reflection had a visual echo that moved slightly out of sync, and his features in the glass were sharp-shadowed and hard.

"Are you―" Bakura couldn't find a sane way to phrase it― "in the mirror?"

He raised a hand to investigate the glass and found that his fingers intersected those of his echo. With a little shudder, he jerked back and wiped the affected skin against his pajama bottoms.

"Right, then, I suppose you're just in front of the mirror. Why?"

There was no response. If he squinted, Bakura could just discern his reflection behind the spirit, which was still giving him the dischuffed goldfish look.

Abandoning any hope of a rational morning, he gave his hands another wash and headed for the kitchen. The spirit chose this time to manifest atop the worktop beside the oven, its legs dangling over the edge and the toaster gleaming through its midsection. He marched past it to the fridge and got out the eggs, milk, and butter.

As he rooted through the cabinet for a frying pan, the skin of his nape crawled. He whirled round and found the spirit so close behind him that his hair whipped through it.

This time he managed not to jump. As he backed away from the spirit's face, he hit upon an explanation.

"I say, are you _bored_?" The last word came out more incredulously than he'd intended; what surprised him wasn't that the spirit was bored per se, but that it was sulking. In Bakura's experience, its moods spanned a narrow range and never strayed far from "maniacal." Of course, in his experience, the spirit had always fended off ennui by going for joyrides in his body.

The spirit still wasn't answering him, but he thought it looked ever so slightly more expectant.

He sighed and set down the pan. Although he didn't feel particularly sympathetic―the slam of his soul room's door still rang in his ears―he didn't fancy being stared at all day. "Come on," he said, heading into the living room. He didn't bother to check whether the spirit followed. "I'll put a video on."

Years of frequent moves had pared down his collection. After a quick rummage through the cabinet, Bakura fed the tape labeled _Pyramids of Mars_ into the video, turned on the television, and went back to the kitchen. He noted with approval that the spirit was, at least, no longer on the worktop.

As long as he was able to cook in peace, he intended to cook well. Out of habit and lingering worry he had bought few perishables during his last shopping trip, but he still had sliced ham, half an onion, and a package of processed cheese to work with. His finished omelette comprised more filling than egg.

From the living room carried the familiar strains of the _Doctor Who_ theme. Bakura took his breakfast with him and found the spirit manifested in a translucent sprawl over the sofa, resentfully watching the television. He opted to sit on the floor rather than through its legs.

"You ought to like this," he said, slicing his omelette. "It's got a high body count."

The spirit glared at him with naked loathing, then turned the same expression on Tom Baker. 

And it had been in such malicious good humor the night before. If Bakura was doomed to spend the rest of his life playing host to an evil spirit, he didn't see why it had to be an evil spirit with mood swings. "Please yourself," he said before tucking into his breakfast.

He paused mid-chew when the hairs rose on back of his neck. A sidelong glance confirmed that the spirit had returned its contemptuous stare to Bakura.

After swallowing, he pointed his fork at the screen and said, "See, the mummies are robots."

In icicle tones, the spirit asked, "How the hell are you doing this?"

"I've got a PAL converter."

The spirit growled and vanished. A moment later he felt it thump into his psyche again with all the efficacy of a pebble against plexiglass. 

He sighed and leaned over to hit the pause button. "Give over, will you? You're going to give us both a headache."

In reply the spirit battered like rain against the window of his mind and demonstrated an almost poetic mastery of offensive words. When it showed no signs of giving up, he resumed the video and returned to his omelette. He made a mental note to buy tomatoes.

"Are you going to be much longer at this?" he asked. "I don't want to miss the mummy getting caught in the badger trap."

The thumping ended in a furious howl as the spirit reappeared wild-eyed and wilder-haired between Bakura and the television, overlaying the images with green tartan. He frowned and squinted through it. "Even in your sleep!" the spirit snarled, jabbing its finger at his forehead. "You idiot mortal _container_ , you shouldn't be able to maintain a barrier when you're unconscious!"

The fork clattered against the plate on its way to the floor. Multiple sentences raced to get out of Bakura's mouth first: "So that's―you were waiting for me to fall asleep so―I told you not to try that again!" A stray thought drifted over the collision. "I say, did you just call me a container?"

It called him worse.

Until yesterday afternoon, Bakura would have found it impossible to imagine asserting authority over the spirit. Now he felt a bit embarrassed that he flinched as it continued to rage at him, twisting its borrowed features almost past the point of resemblance. He was reminded of a wasp that his sister had once caught in a jar, the primary difference being that the wasp had come to accept the futility of attacking the glass.

With a sigh, he left his plate on the coffee table and stood, holding the Ring by the place where the cord looped through it. The spirit cut itself off mid-sentence to demand, "Now what are you doing?"

"Shutting you up, I hope." He shook the Ring vigorously in the spirit's direction and accomplished nothing but hitting his own knuckles with the pointers. Experimentally, he swept the Ring through the space that the spirit did not quite occupy. It watched with narrow-eyed scorn.

When Bakura progressed to flicking the pointers one by one with his forefinger, the spirit made an exasperated noise and flopped down on a rough approximation of the coffee table. The yellow of the omelette seeped through its thigh. "You couldn't even if you knew how," it said sourly, propping its chin on its fist. "You great cosmic accident."

At least it seemed to be on its way back to sulking now, though the insults were not appreciated. Bakura huffed. "I most certainly could. I found my way out of a cave with this thing, I'll have you know."

"Did you," the spirit replied, eschewing the question mark.

"I did! I wanted to do something useful―" Bakura cut himself off when he realized how pathetic he sounded. "That is, I wanted to know the way out, so I held the Ring and thought about it. Well, more than 'thought,' really; I suppose it was a bit like wishing, but also a bit like expecting..." He trailed off, running his finger around the Ring's edge. "I've been missing a sock."

To his delight, one of the pointers stiffened and began to glow. A tingle ran up his arm, coaxing him towards the hallway.

With a murmured "Well, I'll be thrice-damned," the spirit vanished back into his mind, where he felt it settle in like a cinema patron. Bakura followed the tugging triumphantly into his bathroom. The moment he crossed the threshold, all five pointers rose like accusing fingers against the medicine cabinet.

"How do you suppose it got in here?" he mused as he opened the door. The Ring directed him behind the first-aid kit to the bottle of mouthwash that he consistently forgot to use. Withdrawing it from the shadows sent something round and heavy rolling along its bottom. 

Bakura frowned and tipped the bottle until enough green liquid slid off the object to let it gleam gold, and even then it took him several seconds to cobble his thoughts together. He managed not to yelp. "Why is Pegasus's eye in my mouthwash?"

The spirit manifested on the opposite side of the bottle, the contents tinting and refracting its expression. "You'd stopped using the stuff."

"You know very well that isn't what I meant! Why is it here at all?"

"You might have noticed that it isn't in your face." The spirit affected a tone so long-suffering that Bakura, to his own chagrin, came within a syllable of apologizing. It flashed him a distorted green smirk before vanishing.

There had been blood on his sleeves after Duelist Kingdom, he remembered, but he had long ago fallen into the habit of blaming his own clumsiness for mysterious scrapes and stains. It was easier to focus on cleaning up and moving on. 

For a guilty moment he pretended to consider alerting the police. It wasn't as if there was any good in returning the Eye to Pegasus, who, as far as Bakura could remember, wasn't much less evil than the spirit in the Ring. Perhaps he could rinse away the odor of antiseptic mint and make an anonymous donation to Yugi's collection, but then Yugi would go to put it away in the shoebox...

Bakura returned the mouthwash to the medicine cabinet and firmly shut the door.

As the latch caught, a patch of white appeared in the corner of his eye. The spirit cast no reflection as it looped an intangible arm over his shoulder and splayed its hand over the Ring, which stirred slightly against his chest. "It seeks the other Items," said the spirit, having apparently abandoned frothing rage for creepy pedagogy. "It hungers for reunion. To set it on a different scent requires a level of finesse that you lack. Wouldn't you like to learn?"

Reflection or no, he knew that it was grinning. "I've got plenty of other socks," he decided, turning to leave. The spirit drifted backwards ahead of him, fixing him with a look of discomfiting interest that did not waver when he retrieved the cold remains of his omelette from the coffee table and exchanged them for a brownie.

"Aren't you curious?" the spirit asked, insinuating itself between Bakura and the rest of the kitchen. "You could wield powers that made the gods themselves tremble."

He walked through it into the living room, fighting the impulse to shiver at the total lack of sensation. Even ghosts were meant to impart a chill.

"Poor, pathetic host," it whispered into his ear as he claimed a seat on the sofa. "Always so terrified of getting what you want."

The brownie met a mangled end in his fist. "Listen, I'm not stupid! I know you're only trying to take over again so you can hurt my friends, and I won't let you!"

The spirit vanished with a snort and spoke inside Bakura's head: "Surely you don't think I've spent the past five thousand years plotting the demise of your most recent acquaintances."

" _Friends_ ," he said sharply. He tore off nearly half the brownie with his teeth and chewed with therapeutic fervor.

" _Friends_ ," the spirit mimicked, poisoning the phonemes. It laughed low in its throat. "Then why are you spending the weekend alone?"

He had spent the first weekend after Battle City huddled on the sofa, eating handfuls of cereal straight from the box and jumping at every sound that managed to penetrate the fog produced by his painkillers. Two days ago, when Yugi had caught up with him after school and invited him to drop by the game shop on Saturday, Bakura hadn't even cared whether he was an afterthought.

As a response, "Mrph-mmph" got the sentiment across well enough, but he swallowed in order to add detail. "I told them I was ill."

"And they've been ringing you every hour since to inquire after your health."

"Stop it! They're my friends! It's that they're busy now, and I'd hate to be a bother―" He shoved the rest of the brownie into his mouth before anything unfortunate could escape.

The spirit tutted. "They fear me, but for you they feel nothing but pity, which is even now turning to resentment. You've seen the relief in their eyes when you leave them."

Unable to enunciate around the brownie, Bakura thought at it with what he hoped was conversation-killing force, _I'm not listening to you._

A smug laugh echoed inside his skull, but as the sound faded, so did the spirit's presence. It occurred to him that the quiet throbbing in his arm had also faded; he wasn't certain he'd felt it at all since waking. When he rolled up his sleeve, he found the wound a paler red than it had been the day before, and poking it produced only mild discomfort.

It also occurred to him that the video was still playing, now well past the scene with the badger trap. Annoyed, he rewound to the beginning, turned up the volume, and went off in search of his rucksack.

A few minutes later Bakura had settled in on the sofa, still in his pajamas, with his homework arrayed before him on the coffee table. The noise of the television drowned out the silence of the telephone and excused his inability to factor polynomials.

When a bit of white popped into his peripheral vision, he ignored it until it said, "'X' is fourteen."

Frowning, he checked the proposed solution in the margin. "Not unless sixty-eight is suddenly the same as negative three."

"You're rubbish at this," said the spirit.

"I wouldn't be if you let me go to school more often." Despite his inability to make any headway on his homework, he felt his mood rise like a soap bubble. "And I _am_ going to school tomorrow. I'm going to attend all of my classes and take notes and revise as much as I please and earn top marks on all of my exams."

With an exasperated growl, the spirit returned to its skulking-place in the basement of his consciousness. Bakura returned cheerfully to his maths homework, which made no sense but did so with reassuring constancy. On the screen, the mummy extricated itself from the badger trap.

He had progressed to catching up on early American history when the spirit manifested on the other end of the sofa and glowered at the television. Colonies blurred together as he found himself more interested in Sutekh than Saratoga. Deciding that he deserved a break, he marked his place in the book before giving his full attention to the last part of the serial.

When the Doctor emerged triumphant, the spirit crossed its arms and narrowed its eyes. "Host, was this meant to be a cautionary tale?"

"I doubt it, unless you spent time possessing the writers." It stared at Bakura as if he were unfathomably stupid. "Oh, why I picked it, you mean. No, it's just always been one of my favorites. Robot mummies, pyramid traps, Sarah Jane with a rifle―really a classic." He got up to rewind the tape and pick another from the cabinet. "Here, then, let's try _City of Death_."

In short order the spirit began to regale him with its thoughts on Scaroth, which were more interesting than what the Yanks had got up to during the Napoleonic Wars. Bakura gave up trying to revise and made popcorn. When he returned from the kitchen, the spirit demanded to be given control so that it could participate in the snacking, but it took his denial in stride and returned to its villainous peer review. He introduced it to the Daleks next.

By evening the spirit had taken to calling him an anorak, so they moved on to horror films.


	2. Master

[Monday]

The distant beeping of the alarm clock nudged Bakura out of a surprisingly coherent dream in which multiple incarnations of the Doctor had become ravenously undead. He noticed two problems in quick succession: first, that he had nodded off on the sofa with his homework unfinished; second, that the clock on the video indicated his bedroom alarm had been going off for more than twenty minutes. In his panicked sprint to the shower, he forgot about his third problem until it said, "Do something about that infernal racket."

Bakura scowled as he skidded to a stop on the linoleum. "You might have woken me up!"

"I might have," the spirit replied indifferently.

"This is your fault," he snapped, twisting the taps on. "You're the one who wanted to watch _Zombie Flesh-Eaters_ twice." Closing his eyes for at least the illusion of privacy, he struggled out of his pajamas and showered in haste. Even considering taking the Ring off for this process made his arm twinge, and was too much to contend with first thing in the morning.

The spirit was perched not-quite-on the sink when he emerged with a towel around his waist. Refusing to consider whether it had at any point been perched not-quite-in the bath, he rushed past it, grabbing his toothbrush in one hand and his toothpaste in the other, and tried to find a clean uniform. He had meant to do laundry, he remembered, but that was before the spirit had become unexpectedly agreeable about telly.

The hand with the toothbrush slapped the alarm clock into silence. Bakura was attempting simultaneously to clean his teeth and do up his trousers when the spirit appeared in front of him and pointed at the seam running down his right leg. He tried the trousers again right-side out.

After a quick trip back to the loo to spit out his toothpaste, he ran to the living room, buttoning his shirt as he went. This proved to be the breaking point of his coordination; he barked his shin on the coffee table, lost his balance, and landed sideways on the sofa.

He didn't have time to do more than wince as he rolled back to his feet. The collision seemed to have disturbed his papers but not scattered them, though he couldn't shake the sense that he had wasted more pages during his futile struggle with algebra.

"You knocked some under the sofa," the spirit said, now sitting on the floor.

Bakura bent down to grab the wayward papers and stuffed them into his rucksack. "Why, thank you, I―" He cut off with a frown. "You're certainly being helpful this morning."

The spirit curled its lips into what might, on his face, have been a smile. "I am... adaptable."

"What, like flu?" He hesitated with one strap slung over his shoulder. "Sorry, that was unkind. Not that you don't deserve it, mind you." Not liking the circles his thoughts were turning, he shrugged his rucksack the rest of the way on and ran into the kitchen for a cold Pop-Tart, which he gripped between his teeth as he raced out the door.

"Ring's out," said the voice in his head, its tone now somewhere between helpful and cheerfully vindictive. "Flies are open. Left shoe's untied. How do you manage, host?"

Bakura sorted himself out in the lift. "Mmrph," he said around the Pop-Tart, which was staler than expected. Pulling a face, he swallowed the bite he'd taken from the corner. "For starters, I wake up on time."

The lift stopped to admit an elderly woman who turned a disapproving look on his wet hair and crumbling breakfast. "She'd make an excellent fishmonger, wouldn't she?" the spirit remarked. His facial reaction did nothing to improve his fellow passenger's opinion of him.

His mad dash to school included only two instances of tripping over uneven spots in the pavement. Just outside the front entrance, Bakura halted to catch his breath and scoff the rest of the Pop-Tart. He used his moment's peace to reassure himself that he could not possibly have left the cooker on, whereupon his need to worry found a relevant outlet.

"Crumbs," he muttered into his rucksack. "I forgot to bring a lunch."

The spirit cackled brightly. "And we can't have my body going hungry, can we?" It draped itself intangibly over his shoulder and pointed towards a pack of hulking delinquents, none of whom he knew by name. Bullies who made his acquaintance had a tendency to do so only briefly. "Take your pick of theirs."

Knowing better than to make eye contact with aggressive animals, even aggressive animals who had been giving him a conspicuously wide berth for weeks, Bakura focused on a patch of grass. _It's_ my _body, and you must be joking._

"Dead serious, host. Tell them you're in need of lunch and you'd like to see what's on the menu. If they give you any lip, I'll teach you how to seal their souls into their sandwiches." It ignored his horrified expression as it continued, "Souls go nicely on pastrami."

_I've lost my appetite,_ Bakura thought stiffly at it, turning to enter the school. He walked directly into a thug even more enormous than the ones gathered nearby.

"Sorry!" he blurted, throwing up his arms to shield his face. Between his terror and the spirit's laughter, it took him several seconds to process that the thug was apologizing to him in equally frantic tones. Bakura lowered his arms and stared.

Shoving a heavy paper bag into his hands, the thug bellowed, "Just don't do me the way you did Frank!" before bolting.

Hesitantly, Bakura unrolled the top of the bag and sniffed. A rush of horseradish scorched his sinuses. He rolled the bag back down, tucked it away in his rucksack, and continued inside, thinking, _Don't you dare tell me what you did to Frank._

"Do you really think I bother learning their names?"

Bakura stopped again to take deep, calming breaths. He considered how he must have looked: face sweaty and flushed, hair still damp, uniform rumpled and spotted with pastry crumbs. After making an effort to smooth himself down, he squared his shoulders and entered his classroom.

Yugi and the rest were gathered near the center, opening foil-wrapped packets of cards. Something twinged low in Bakura's chest. He'd never got the chance to try his new occult deck, though he gathered that the spirit had already given it a workout. Perhaps it was just as well; apparently even the rules of the game had changed while he was unawares.

Tristan was half-facing the door and clearly only half-interested in the cards, so it didn't take more than a moment for him to spot Bakura. He waved and called out a greeting, which Bakura returned. The spirit made noises of exaggerated revulsion.

As he approached, Yugi grinned at him and said, "My grandpa got a huge shipment of cards this morning. Here, catch!"

The foil packet sailed through Bakura's fingers and rebounded from his chest, striking the Ring beneath his shirt. For a panicked moment he couldn't tell whether the metallic jangle was real or imagined. 

Joey reached down for the packet and pressed it into Bakura's trembling hands, saying, "Here ya go. Man, you're shakin' like a leaf!" 

"Thank you," Bakura replied, slipping it into his rucksack. He backed away. "I, ah, suppose I'd better sit down before―"

Yugi furrowed his brow. "Should you even be here today?"

Bakura's legs locked mid-stride, obliterating his balance. He crashed into a chair and would have followed it to the floor if Joey hadn't caught his arm. As he got control of his feet again, he babbled, between bursts of nervous laughter, "Of course! School! Good attendance! Exams coming up, yes? Why wouldn't I be here?"

Téa frowned. "You caught that stomach bug. Joey was out sick with it for a week."

"Yes! Of course! Right." Bakura coughed to work some of the tension out of his vocal folds. "Just a touch of the lurgy, actually. I rested and drank plenty of fluids. Fit as a fiddle now." He backed up a few more steps, ran his leg into a desk, and let out another bleat of involuntary laughter. "I sit here, don't I?"

Brow furrowed, Yugi pointed to a desk three rows away from the one with which Bakura had collided. "Um, you got moved to the front, remember? You _sure_ you're okay?"

"Never better!" With a smile that he hoped was not manic, Bakura darted to his assigned seat. His palms were damp enough to leave residue when he wiped them against his trousers.

In the back of his mind, the spirit began a slow handclap. "Bravo, host. How is it you can act out a dozen roles in a Monster World game but you can't tell a single credible lie?"

The first syllable of a retort slipped past his lips before he remembered where he was. Clapping a hand to his mouth, he thought, _Because I'm not a ruddy sociopath,_ and opened his rucksack. It occurred to him that, although he had attended school with something almost like regularity during the last week, he had been so distracted that he couldn't say now which of his classes came first. He glanced towards Yugi's group and found them deep in conversation.

About him, he supposed. The twitch in his stomach was answered by the twitch of the Ring against his skin. In an instant the ambient noises of the classroom faded, and the group's voices reached him as clearly as if the intervening air had formed a funnel into his ear.

"Is it just me," Tristan was saying, "or is Bakura acting a little weird today?"

"Bakura's a little weird every day," Joey replied, but he sounded concerned when he added, "Oh man, do you think that evil Ring's back again?"

"But he seems happy," Téa pointed out, "and 'happy' isn't the word I'd use for him when that thing's in control. At least, not the good kind of happy."

"Anyway, the Ring's in my closet, remember?" said Yugi. "It can't do anything to him from in there."

The spirit sighed loudly inside Bakura's head. "And by such towering intellects am I thwarted."

_Says a fair bit about you, doesn't it?_ Bakura poked the Ring until the voices were swallowed by the classroom buzz. When the bell rang shortly thereafter, he glanced at his classmates' textbook selections to figure out which subject he was meant to be learning.

His pledge to take notes lasted until mid-morning, when he discovered that he could not be made to care about the early nineteenth century. After a quick glance to be sure no one was paying him any mind, he sketched the outline of a gallows and drew eleven dashes beside it. He directed a query towards the back of his mind and was answered by the sensation of the spirit shifting drowsily. After a noise somewhere between a yawn and a chuckle, it said, "E. R. S. H. 'Horseradish,' you predictable pillock. Draw me seven."

When the bell rang for lunch, Bakura snapped his notebook shut and hoped none of his classmates had noticed his two-page spread of hangman games, or at least that none of them noticed how many of the answers might have been grounds for a psychological evaluation. His last three school counselors had ended up as tavern keepers, and he wasn't certain how to approach a counseling session that wouldn't end in a magical coma.

"Hey, Bakura!" Yugi flopped into the seat behind him, causing him to whirl in alarm. A novelty Dark Magician lunchbox hit the desk. "Wanna eat lunch together?"

The spirit muttered quasi-intelligibly but unmistakably rudely as it curled up in a sulk. Bakura did not acknowledge it. "Of course! Is it just the two of us, then?"

Yugi looked at him strangely for a moment before replying, "I guess you've been pretty zoned out lately. Joey and Tristan tried to sneak into the girls' locker room last week―and I told them it was a bad idea, 'cuz everyone's still pretty freaked out about what happened to Mr. Karita―and Téa caught them, and then some of the other girls caught them while Téa was trying to sneak them out, and Téa ended up getting in trouble, too. She's still kinda mad at them." He released the latch on his lunchbox. "Anyway, they've got lunch detention today. What'd you bring?"

Ignoring the spirit's sneering remark about Villager D, Bakura opened the bribe he had received from the thug and released a heady aroma into the classroom. Peeling back one end of the wax paper enclosing the sandwich made his eyes water. Sauce dribbled out the open end.

Yugi sniffed, then raised his eyebrows as he traced the source of the smell. "Wow, Bakura, that's a lot of horseradish!"

"I, er, had a jar of it to use up," he replied. 

The sandwich continued to fascinate. "And is that a whole pound of steak?"

"Tell him you had a cow to use up," said the spirit.

Bakura tried to keep his irritation from showing on his face. "I suppose I'm rather hungry after being ill all weekend. What did you bring?"

Yugi's mother packed his lunches as if she expected him to have lost half the contents by the time he sat down to eat, a strategy suggesting that she knew nothing about the bully repellent hanging from her son's neck. The caloric overload tended to leave Yugi comfortably comatose for an hour or so; as this block of time overlapped their maths class, his marks were not much higher than Bakura's.

Today Yugi had three apples, two packages of crisps, and his pick of peanut butter and ham sandwiches. Bakura found himself the recipient of salt and vinegar crisps and an apple. To his relief, the spirit burrowed deep and didn't bother him as he ate and made carefully light conversation. His sinuses burned clean.

"I can't believe you ate all that," Yugi said around a hypocritical mouthful of his second sandwich. Bakura braced himself for another query about his health, but Yugi's attention shifted to the clock on the wall. He swallowed and grinned. "Hey, we've still got a while before class starts. You wanna have a quick duel? It feels like we haven't played together in forever."

Bakura refrained from pointing out that, in point of fact, he and Yugi had never dueled each other. The spirit drifted to the surface of his mind like a curious crocodile.

"And to make it interesting," Yugi went on, reaching into his pocket, "we could each shuffle a new pack of cards into our decks. That would really keep us on our toes!"

Over the spirit's disparaging commentary, Bakura fished his cards from the bottom of his rucksack and replied, "That does sound like fun. But would you mind too terribly much if we played by the old rules?"

Yugi shrugged cheerfully. "Sure, if you want, but the Battle City rules are really fun. I gotta give Kaiba that!"

By all accounts, Battle City had been a thrilling experience for everyone who remained conscious through it. Had the tournament ended less explosively, Bakura might have asked for a commemorative photograph of himself with Kaiba Corp's medical staff.

"But we don't have very long for lunch," Yugi went on, shuffling his new deck, "so I guess we're better off playing to two thousand life points. Why don't you start?"

An unsubtle suggestion oozed into Bakura's mind, pointing out how much more fun a Shadow Game would be. _Hush up,_ he thought sternly as he surveyed the hand he had drawn. It was not a promising one. 

In short order he found himself down half his life points and facing Yugi's Dark Magician, which seemed overkill when Bakura had only the Earl of Demise with Spellbinding Circle sapping 700 of its already insufficient attack points. It wasn't that he expected to win, of course, but he would have preferred to lose by a narrower margin.

With quiet resignation, he drew and added an unexpected Change of Heart to his hand. His mixed feelings about the card were outweighed by the fact that it did him no good when Yugi had no other monsters on his side of the field to attack.

"Why so glum, host?" the spirit purred inside Bakura's head. "You've drawn precisely what you need to turn this fiasco of a duel around."

He took stock again of the field: one monster for him, one monster for Yugi, and under the current rules, no direct attacks allowed upon a player's life points. _I certainly don't see how._

"Think." When Bakura followed its advice to no avail, the spirit made an exasperated noise and added, "Stop looking at his monster and start looking at his trap card."

Using his free hand as a shield, he turned Change of Heart around to make sure that he hadn't somehow missed additional text printed on the back. _Er, I don't think I can do that._

"Have you learned nothing from watching the pharaoh duel?" Translucent hair sprang into his field of vision as the spirit leaned over to jab its finger at the table. "Play the damned card!"

_But it doesn't even have a heart,_ Bakura pointed out. _It isn't a monster._

"Perhaps you should listen more carefully when he prattles on about the Heart of the Cards."

Across the table, the prattler in question raised his eyebrows and waved. "Bakura? Are you okay over there?"

"Just fine, thank you," he replied, then took a deep breath and laid the card face-up in front of him. "I activate Change of Heart on your, um, Spellbinding Circle."

Yugi stared into the distance for several seconds, then gave him a sheepish look. "Sorry, but he's really getting into this. Is it okay if I let him finish the duel?"

A polite refusal would have been honored, no doubt, but only at the price of plunging the game into awkwardness. Bakura tried to keep the reluctance out of his face as he nodded.

Strands of Yugi's fringe sprang up, and his eyes narrowed. "That was an interesting move."

"Ah, thank you," Bakura said as his pulse leapt in his throat. He stared at his cards to avoid the visual memory of Yami standing beneath the coils of the dragon. Willing his hands steady, he shifted the Spellbinding Circle card to the Dark Magician.

The spirit spat out a laugh like a splash of acid. "How pitiful. Even the pharaoh's vessel exploits your weakness."

Bakura took a moment to work out what it meant. _Yugi's not like that. He's just... very strong, and I think sometimes he doesn't understand when other people aren't._ Without giving the spirit a chance to respond, he attacked the weakened Dark Magician and was almost giddily surprised when no last-minute maneuver prevented him. Two hundred life points shaved themselves from Yugi's lead.

The glow of success dimmed when Yami promptly vanquished the Earl of Demise with an opportunely drawn Gaia the Fierce Knight, then declined to attack the face-down Sangan that Bakura played. Curse of Dragon and a worrisome array of set cards joined the side of the field that Bakura would dearly have liked to swap for his own.

He drew again and found himself in possession of a Revival Jam.

"Excellent," said the spirit. "Now fuse it with that Sangan."

Bakura frowned. _How, exactly?_

The spirit gritted its teeth, then swung round to overlay his field of vision. It wore an earnest, helpful expression that fit poorly on its face. "Here, why not let me have control for a bit?" it said, hooking its spectral fingers over the tops of his cards. "Just long enough to finish this duel."

_Shan't._ He pulled his cards closer to his face to block his view of the spirit. _Fool me twice, shame on me._

"Fine," the spirit snarled, abandoning all efforts at civility. Its sneer appeared in the few inches between Bakura's face and his hand. "Just stack the bloody cards together. Surely even you can manage that."

Yami cleared his throat. "It's still your move, Bakura."

"Yes, just a moment, please." He fanned his cards out and waved them in a futile attempt to shoo the spirit, then sighed and pinched Polymerization and the incompatible monster together between his fingers. "I activate, ah, this―" he laid the spell card gingerly on the field― "to fuse my... these."

Cackling like a deranged hen, the spirit vacated Bakura's personal space. Yami leaned over the desk, his puzzle swinging forward, and scrutinized what, in a holographically enhanced game, would doubtless have appeared as a writhing puddle of misery. "A clever move," he said coolly, settling back into his seat, "but not clever enough. Go, Living Arrow!"

Bakura watched with resigned bemusement as Gaia the Dragon Champion joined the fray. _Oh, dear,_ he thought, nudging his monster cards apart on the field. _I used to think I understood this game._

"Stop whinging," the spirit said, "and take advantage of that Sangan's effect."

_I don't think I'm allowed―_

The spirit's expression might have scorched steel.

_Right, then._

By the next turn Bakura had given up on understanding what he was being told to do and why no moves were ever deemed illegal. At the spirit's insistence, his Revival Jam inexplicably and quite pointlessly attacked Living Arrow. Presumably this was all part of some master plan.

Before it came to any sort of fruition, Yami placed Twister on the playing field with a flourish and announced, "This card destroys one spell or trap card at the cost of five hundred of my life points. And by using it in conjunction with this Time Wizard, I can target a card played at any point in the duel!"

"Bollocks," the spirit snapped. "Call him on that one."

_What, after I played Change of Heart on a trap card?_

The spirit's palms slapped silently through the desk as Yami pontificated his way back to the Earl of Demise caught in the Spellbinding Circle, which this time remained in place as the Dark Magician blasted it to pieces. Bakura blinked and offered his uncertain congratulations to his opponent, whose hair relaxed.

"Hey, good game!" Yugi said brightly, returning his cards to his deck. "You had almost had us there." The spirit expressed an incompatible sentiment.

Bakura managed a smile regardless, glanced at the clock on the classroom wall, and took a deep breath. "I thought," he began, "I mean, I've been thinking, perhaps, if you're not busy tomorrow―and I'm sorry, I'm asking a bit late, but―" He clipped that line of thought and started over. "Would it be all right if I invited you and the others to my flat to play a game?"

The spirit latched onto his forebrain like a raptor onto a buckskin glove, incapable of damage but inescapably present. Bakura tried to will it off as Yugi grinned and replied, "Sure, I'd love to! I know Joey's not doing anything, and Téa doesn't work Tuesdays. I'll have to check with Tristan, but I think he can come, too. What game?"

Bakura spoke slowly, to smooth over the cracks in his voice. "Have you ever heard of Monster World?"

Of course Yugi had. Bakura left him a with hastily scrawled list of character races and classes to share with the others before excusing himself to the loo. Five minutes, he hoped, would be enough time to do something about his trembling hands.

As soon as the door swung shut behind him, he gripped the sides of the nearest sink and took deep, calming breaths. He hoped his cheeks hadn't been quite so red while he was talking to Yugi.

"So after all that fuss," the spirit said dryly, "you want new playmates."

"No! Not like that!" Blush deepening, he glanced about in a near-panic for eavesdroppers. _I'm tired of being afraid of it. I want to play it again now that it's safe._

"How bold of you." The spirit chuckled. "I don't suppose you'll let me be the game master?"

He splashed cold water on his face, to little visible effect. _Stop it._

Bakura learned nothing during his maths class.

* * *

The spirit loomed as Bakura settled in to spend the evening at his work table, putting his back to the cases of figurines. The only ones he wished to see were the four in front of him, all now halfway through their class customizations as their final Kneadatite additions cured. In another world, he tried and failed not to think, he might have been doing the same work under duress, tremors fading along with his protests, shuddering in and out of consciousness as putty dried like old blood under his nails. He tried to tell himself that he would not have capitulated in the end, even though the spirit was overwhelming and the others were practically strangers.

After all, these four figurines were cold and soulless. Bakura supposed this meant he had won, or at least that the spirit hadn't.

Drifting halfway through the table, the spirit curled a finger through Yugi's miniature and said, "It's pathetic how you beg for their time when you could have had them forever."

"That isn't the same." 

At first Bakura had played with the haunted figurines out of a sense of tribute to fallen friends; now that he knew the truth, he wasn't certain whether it was less horrible to force them through adventures or to leave them locked away in the dark. He feared it was selfishness that made him opt for the former.

He hoped they didn't mind. There simply wasn't enough time to rewrite a campaign, customize the figurines of Yugi and the rest, and create a new set of NPCs.

At least the campaign didn't require extensive revision. Certain of the spirit's creative flourishes needed pruning, of course, if only to forestall suspicious looks from the players, but the bulk of the work had always been Bakura's. Now that his campaign would no longer be appropriated as a murder weapon, he could flesh out the world again and shift the focus away from deathtraps.

The spirit watched and scowled. "You're taking out all the good bits." 

"Leave off. This is my campaign."

"And it's too damned predictable. Put the entire town under the thrall of the Dark Master, and then let them see how far that 'friendly information' from the NPCs gets them."

Bakura tapped his pencil against the table. "That's rather a cruel trick for first-time players."

"And it would serve them right for failing to wonder what such a quaint village is doing next to a fortress of evil." The spirit gave him a conspiratorial grin. "If you want to be fair, give them some true hints―from the spirits in the cemetery."

"That's... not a bad idea, actually." After skimming through his outline, he decided, "I could do with another puzzle. Perhaps the ghosts are headless and so can't speak, but they can make anagrams from the letters on their headstones..."

With an approving nod, the spirit drifted closer, intersecting the table with its torso. "The letters bleed."

A smile tugged at Bakura's lips as he began to make notes. "Joey's going to hate this bit, I'm sure. I'll have to add something fun for his warrior to do."

The spirit flashed him an annoyed look, which Bakura ignored as he rose to answer the beeping of the kitchen timer. It had been entirely too long since he had willingly and consciously entertained guests; tomorrow's would be the beneficiaries of a long pent-up baking spree. With what remained of the ingredients he'd bought on the way home, he expected to manage two more batches of biscuits and a fourth tray bake before bed.

As he eased the sheet out of the oven, the spirit hissed into his ear, "You don't understand what it means to be a game master."

"No, you're the one who has the wrong of it." Pleased that he had not been startled into dropping anything, Bakura transferred his payload to a cooling rack. "You're meant to be making sure the game is fun."

"I always have a great deal of fun."

"Don't be thick. Fun for _everyone_ , I mean." Prepping the next pan had the added benefit of drowning out whatever horrible sentiment the spirit expressed in response. It sulked after him like a personal raincloud as he mixed a quick tray bake and slid the pan into the oven.

When he and a cup of tea settled back in at the table, he found the Kneadatite dry enough for painting. The spirit vanished as he set about bringing the figurines to strictly figurative life. Beneath his brush the putty transformed into cloth, flesh, and weapons.

"I wanted us to have a partnership."

Bakura frowned and continued resolutely to detail Téa's magician's robe. In the corner of his vision, he watched the spirit take spectral form to sit sideways atop a box, its eyes glittering like fishhooks. 

"You're jealous of the pharaoh's vessel. Don't deny it. And I tried to give you that, but you rejected me."

As little as he knew about the specifics of that relationship, Bakura was reasonably certain that the Puzzle's spirit had not introduced itself by digging into Yugi's torso and taking gleeful credit for years of misfortunes. He wondered if the five scars on his chest would ever fade.

The long smirk on the spirit's face suggested that it had no need to read his thoughts. "Didn't I tell you how pleased I was to be inside you?"

He shuddered. "Don't start with that. And Tristan told me you tried to steal Mokuba's body."

"That mouth-breathing prat couldn't find his own arse with a map."

"He said he tricked you and sorted you out with a single blow."

The spirit growled. "That is a reckless exaggeration."

"What, really?" Bakura set down his brush to stare at it. His eyebrows crept up his forehead. "That actually happened? I reckoned you'd tripped and hit my head on something! Tristan really beat you up?"

"It was a damned lucky—"

"That's not the bit I'm cross about!"

" _I_ was more than a bit cross with _you_ ," the spirit replied sourly. "Have you forgotten how you betrayed me?"

"You were going to kill my friends!" That they had not yet become his friends was beside the point, and Bakura was too busy hating how defensive he sounded to fret over chronology. His hands entered the conversation in uncoordinated indignation. "And then you threw me down on the field and expected me to murder them for you! And you think you've got any right to be put out with _me_?"

The spirit shrugged. "You've got a point there."

Static sizzled in Bakura's brain. His jaw hung slack as the more robust parts of his mind frantically dismantled and reassembled syllables, trying to work out which he had just misheard. 

"I should have let you sleep through it," the spirit said, addressing a spot on the wall. "You'd made it clear enough that you were opposed to participation." It frowned. "In hindsight, I might have lost the plot somewhere in that sequence of improvisations."

He continued to gape.

"Shut your gob, host. You look like a fish."

To signal an end to the conversation, Bakura went to the kitchen for more tea. The tray bake was nearly ready, he noticed, so he took his herbal supplement while he waited. The bottle assured him that the contents were non-addictive, though no federal agency staked its reputation on that claim.

As he eased the pan out of the oven, the spirit appeared on the worktop and said, "Excellent work on those figurines, by the way."

"Thank you." He waited for the other shoe.

"It would be a shame not to bring them to life."

Bakura blew his fringe out of his eyes and set the pan down with more force than necessary. "Listen, you," he said, then lowered his voice to a level less likely to alarm his neighbors. "If you behave—really behave, I mean, no more talking rot about souls—I'll give you, er, something."

"How enticing," it said dryly.

"Some sort of reward, I mean." When this also failed to entice the spirit, he took a deep breath and added, "I'll let you stretch your legs."

A slow grin twisted the spirit's mouth without reaching its eyes. Its words oozed out like malicious treacle: "You mean to _bargain_ with me. How very predictable of you, host."

The upper hand was indisputably Bakura's, so he was annoyed by his own defensiveness. "Just for a bit, I mean. And I still wouldn't let you do anything horrible."

"I do love a bargain," it replied, and vanished. After a low chuckle that raised the hair on his nape, the spirit fell silent.

He measured out the sugar for his next batch of biscuits with "So that was a 'yes,' then?" squirming on the tip of his tongue.

* * *

[Tuesday]

Despite his waking up even before the alarm went off, Bakura managed to arrive at school late, after getting caught up in last-minute tidying and the artful arrangement of his baked goods on the coffee table. He learned no more than he had the day before. Maths class in particular suffered, as he spent the entire hour elated after having been the center of the lunchtime conversation. The exasperation of the spirit and his teachers alike failed to faze him.

His friends followed him home from school, filling what was ordinarily a quiet walk with raucous activity. By the time they made it to his building, Joey had somehow acquired a fizzy drink, and he and Tristan both attempted to work mischief on Téa's mobile phone charm during their ride in the lift. Bakura basked in it.

There was a package propped against his door, in casual defiance of its signature requirement. The label indicated that his most recent shipment of proper English sweets had arrived. He nudged it inside with his foot as he eased the door open.

"This is my flat, then." Beaming, he stood clear of the doorway and gestured towards the desserts visible on the coffee table. "I made―"

The rest of the sentence was rendered unnecessary as Joey and Tristan dashed for the brownies, leaving semi-intelligible sounds of appreciation in their wake.

With an exaggerated sigh, Téa slipped off her sandals. "They're such _boys_. Thanks for having us over, Bakura."

"Yeah, your place looks really cool!" Yugi grinned and turned his admiring attention to the living room. "Are your parents home?"

The question stung, but Bakura had never told them about his family. "No, we've the run of the place today," he replied, the spirit's sarcasm ringing in the back of his mind. "May I offer you something to drink?"

The Monster World table impressed them even more than the size of his flat had, and their personalized figurines delighted them. Yugi grasped the mechanics of the game even before they were explained to him, of course, but Bakura was pleased that the others also caught on quickly, and with only a few mishaps involving the simultaneous manipulation of dice and baked goods. The spirit loomed behind his eyes.

Tristan rolled the first pair of nines during a pitched battle in the cemetery. Bakura scooted his laptop nearer to his lap as a precaution; there had already been one close call with fizzy drinks when everyone became a bit too excited about solving the first puzzle.

"That's a critical fumble," he explained. "You've got to roll again to see what the penalty will be."

As Tristan breathed on the dice for luck, the pointers of the Ring tingled. A sense of absolute entitlement pulsed through Bakura so intensely that he had to pull his arm back before he grabbed Tristan's wrist.

"Why bother," whispered the voice in his head, "when this one is yours to do with as you please?"

_Don't you dare start,_ Bakura thought at it, and the spirit retreated into a sulk that weighed like a soggy lima bean on the back of his mind.

Tristan's magic gunman shot himself in the foot. Joey teased him incessantly until his own character fumbled into an open grave. Having better luck with her dice, Téa unleashed super-critical magical destruction on a pack of hellhounds, and Yugi tamed enough of the survivors to form a cricket team. Bakura typed in a few hasty modifications to his encounter tables.

He couldn't remember when he'd last run a game for a group that understood teamwork so well. They adapted quickly to traveling in formation, used biscuits as visual aids as they pondered puzzles, and protected one another fiercely during combat. He hadn't planned for more than a few deathtraps in Zorc's castle, but he found himself incorporating some of the spirit's more creative ideas just to watch the party rise to the challenge. The exhilaration, he decided, was worth the sneering in the back of his head, and almost worth the brief, suspicious flipping of Yugi's fringe.

When Yugi at last fumbled, the spirit wanted so fiercely that Bakura had to excuse himself to the loo to weed its emotions from his. "This is precisely what I told you not to do," he told his reflection, which gazed back accusingly with flushed cheeks. Before he returned to the game, he hid the bottle of mouthwash behind his cleaning supplies.

Eventually, over the spirit's objections, the dark lord was vanquished. This was how the game was meant to end; there should have been no novelty to it, but Bakura's pulse didn't slow until his laptop had powered down and all the dice were tucked back into their pouches. He couldn't recall the last time he had seen friends to the door rather than into an ambulance. 

Small talk did not come naturally.

"Thank you all ever so much for coming," he said, hovering as his guests put their shoes back on. "It's so nice to play a game that doesn't end with anybody dead or sealed into an inanimate object."

Three heartbeats tripped over one another. Bakura's brain scrambled to explain away his last statement until Téa said, "Yeah, I know what you mean. I don't ever want to get stuck in a Duel Monsters card again!"

"Yes!" Bakura's voice leapt out like a rabbit with a nervous disorder. "Duel Monsters cards! Stuck. Yes."

"How fortunate for you," the spirit said, drowning out a remark from Tristan, "that these planks are even thicker than you are."

_Hush up, you._ Bakura cleared his throat before addressing his guests: "Here, I, ah―here." Blushing, he held out the figurines. "I think you ought to keep these."

Yugi's face lit up, then clouded with quiet worry. "Wow, really? But it must have taken you a really long time to make them. Are you sure?"

Ignoring the spirit raging in the back of his head, Bakura nodded and tried not to sound too flustered. "Well, yes, a bit, but they're yours now. Please think of them as souvenirs." He tried not to sound wistful. "If you want to play again, you can bring them back with you."

They agreed and thanked him, and he waved after them until they vanished into the lift. A dense silence rushed in to fill the vacuum as he closed himself back into his flat.

"That went well," he decided. Receiving no answer from the spirit, he leaned against the wall and let out a breath that wasn't quite a sigh. "It was fun, and they were happy, and for once they were having fun and being happy with me..." He brought up a hand to rub his eyebrows, behind which stirred a headache. "I suppose that was selfish."

The spirit laughed inside his skull. "You relished holding their feeble lives in your hands, teasing them with hope, knowing you could decide their fates with impunity. Didn't you love watching them squirm?"

"No!" he snapped, much louder than he intended.

"I know the deepest wishes of your heart." The spirit's voice dropped to a ragged whisper: "All you've ever wanted is to play god."

Self-loathing coiled in the pit of his stomach, where it was indistinguishable from anger. Breathing hard through his nose, Bakura walked with his fists held tight to his sides. "For someone who lives in my head, you don't know me at all."

The spirit did not join him in the kitchen―at least not visibly―so he channeled his negative emotions into washing up. Sweat dampened his face as he moved on to self-medicating with tea and herbs. Discovering that his bottle of supplements was nearly empty did nothing to improve his mood.

When his grip on his mug became somewhat less white-knuckled, the spirit appeared opposite him at the table and said, "I am due a reward."

Bakura's hand re-clenched. "You didn't behave yourself."

"No one's dead. No one's soul is anywhere interesting."

"There's more to good behavior than not doing things you can't do in the first place!" After a long sip of tea, he met the spirit's indignant expression. "And you still don't understand. The game isn't about trying to defeat the players. The game master is _meant_ to lose. You're meant to be difficult about it, of course, but you're a rubbish game master if you win."

The spirit barked a laugh that bared most of its teeth. "You're _meant_ to lose only in service of a greater victory. And you, of all people, can't pretend otherwise. You allowed those little fools to win in the vain hope of keeping them."

"I think you lose a great deal without meaning to," Bakura replied stiffly, hoping to fend off the conversation from the sore spot it was poking. "And I told you there was to be no more talking rot about souls."

Contempt dripped from the spirit's voice: "You think, do you?"

He set his tea down with much more force than necessary, splashing his hand and the table. He ignored the mess as he went to retrieve one of the few leftover biscuits, muttering, "I can't believe you think you've behaved."

Behind him, the spirit began to cackle. "I expected as much," it whispered, suddenly very near to his ear. " _This_ is how you play god."

The biscuit cracked apart under pressure. "Listen, I would have kept my end if you'd kept yours!"

Still cackling, the spirit vanished from Bakura's peripheral vision and filled the inside of his head. As he attempted to ignore it in favor of cleaning up crumbs, it lilted, "You've got no finesse, host."

He almost preferred the sulking.


	3. Survivor

[Wednesday]

Three reasonably attentive days at school in a row was a recent personal best, the sort of thing to be celebrated by packing sweets for lunch. That his most recent shipment of them had just arrived in the post represented a rare instance of circumstances conspiring in Bakura's favor. He brought enough to share but found his friends suddenly absent when it was time to eat, so he enjoyed a double portion. Algebra suffered again as he coasted through a blood sugar crash.

On the whole, it wasn't a bad day until he remembered that Wednesdays ended with gym class.

He made the trudge to the gymnasium as slowly as possible, letting his classmates jostle past him. The spirit had been quiet for hours, and with any luck would remain so; sport was miserable enough without a running commentary. When a loud remark from down the hall suggested that dodgeball awaited him, he slowed to a halt and went digging in his pockets for leftover sweets. It was just as well that Yugi and the others had wandered off, he told himself. Joey and Tristan tended to escalate contact sports.

Bakura popped a liquorice allsort into his mouth, glanced out the window, and saw a dragon.

Not Slifer, he realized, but his pulse had already become a struggling butterfly in his throat. He took deep, focused breaths and thought about dodgeball, which loomed large enough to force out memories of his own helplessness and the spirit's selfish sacrifice. Holding his arms tight against his sides, he resumed walking in a haze of anticipated projectiles.

A moment later it occurred to him that there was still a great bloody dragon outside. He froze mid-step to stare into an enormous, unblinking amber eye.

 _Er,_ he thought, sending his panic to tap politely at the presence curled up deep inside his mind, _are you perhaps somehow doing this?_

The spirit roused in an electric blaze of interest.

From down the hall came the first of several screams. "Right," Bakura said as he darted into the nearest stairwell, "didn't expect so."

Deciding that "dragon attack" did not map neatly to any of Domino High's disaster plans, he ignored everything being broadcast over the school's public address system in favor of running downstairs and out the first door that put the building between him and the dragon. He took off at a sprint in the direction of his flat.

The rest of the neighborhood appeared to be free of monsters. For a moment he wondered if the dragon had been a very convincing illusion; in the next he heard an impossibly loud roar, and a Nimble Momonga chittered at him as it scampered across a power line. He ducked, panting, into a corner shop.

"Go back outside," the spirit said, with such casual authority that Bakura took an unthinking step backwards, "and surrender control."

 _Don't be daft._ He tried to will the trembling out of his hands as he picked up a shopping basket and waved to the shop assistant, who had the nervous look of someone trying to reconcile peals of thunder with a cloudless day.

The spirit hissed. "You're the daft one. What do you intend to do when monsters-given-flesh assault you in the street?"

Bakura headed resolutely towards the shelves of tins at the back of the shop. _I intend to go home, lock the door, and stay put until this is sorted. I'll not have you running amok and making an even greater mess of things._ After a moment's consideration, he backtracked down the aisle and picked up a bottle of paracetamol. 

The spirit pricked up like a dog's ears at the sound of the pills rattling together. "Host, have you made my body ill with your heedless consumption of baked goods?"

 _It's_ my _body, and no._ Bakura grabbed a box of plasters as he resumed walking. _I don't fancy holing up with you indefinitely without anything for a headache._

With the spirit weighing resentfully on the back of his mind, he picked through the store's tinned food selection, which consisted almost entirely of the wrong sort of baked beans, alarmingly pink meats, and stewed tomatoes. Under a display stand, he found a tin of sliced pineapple, looking lonely and expired. He opted primarily for tomatoes.

As he attempted to introduce a bit of variety into his diet, an image of raw sirloin drifted into his mind, accompanied by the coppery tang of blood.

 _No,_ he thought firmly. _That isn't even sold here._ From outside came a less distant draconic rumble, prompting Bakura to be less discriminating in his choice of potted meats. _And anyway, we've got Bovril at home._

The spirit's response, which was probably rude, was drowned out by a noise that only a skeptic of Kaiba's caliber could have called thunder. The shop assistant began to fidget.

On his way to the till, Bakura added a package of beef jerky to his basket. _There, happy?_

"No."

He was forgetting something, he knew, but the assistant looked ready to bolt, and the spirit's palpable disaffection made it difficult to focus. Between his own distraction and the assistant's, Bakura fumbled the coins he received as change. When he bent to pick them up, the tremor that shook the entire shop persuaded him not to fret over thirty-four cents. He scooped up his bags and ran.

Before he had made it halfway down the block, a blue glob splatted on the pavement in front of him, then resolved itself into a belligerent Revival Jam. He skidded to a halt.

"Clear off!" he told it, with what he hoped was an aggressive shaking of his bags. "Go on, shoo!" When it oozed closer, he yelped, leapt backwards, and shifted his bags into one arm in order to scrabble at the cards in his pocket. He came away with Dark Necrofear. Shaking a playing card intimidated the Revival Jam almost as much as shaking the bags had.

"How does this work?" he asked. "The bringing-cards-to-life trick, I mean. Tristan told me about it."

"It won't work, for you." The spirit's voice carried the shape of a bored sneer. "Now if you don't fancy being digested alive, host, give me―"

Warmth tingled against Bakura's chest in the shape of the Ring. Something pinched at the back of his mind, and he tripped over a breath as white light sluiced from the card and poured itself into the imposing figure depicted in the artwork. Dark Necrofear turned to face him, in the process revealing a mangled marionette cradled in her arms.

"So she'll bring her baby to see _you_ ," the spirit muttered.

"Don't talk rot when there's a monster trying to eat me!" Bakura craned his neck to make eye contact with Dark Necrofear, who tilted her head. For an infernal abomination, she seemed agreeable enough; she didn't even seem offended when he put her between himself and the Revival Jam, which had reared up on its approximation of hind legs. "Sorry to bother you," he said, "but could you please get rid of that thing?"

She nodded and nestled the doll among his bags, then turned towards the Revival Jam. He missed seeing exactly what she did to it―the doll had rotated its head towards him and begun to gibber―but after an explosion of light she remained sleek and clean, whilst her opponent repainted a nearby wall. When she retrieved her baby, she also took the bags.

The spirit scoffed. "Now she's just showing off."

Ignoring it, Bakura said, "Thank you. I don't know what I'd have done on my own." Dark Necrofear gave him a slight nod of acknowledgment. "Er, you don't mean to carry all of those for me, do you? I'd hate to take advantage―"

The spirit made a loud exasperated noise that brought Bakura's hands uselessly to his ears. He blushed as he let his arms fall. "I mean, this is very kind of you. It isn't much farther to my flat."

Dark Necrofear's boots struck like hammers against the pavement as they walked. She never spoke. From time to time her doll clacked its jaws together and giggled eerily, but she responded to Bakura's efforts at conversation only by fixing him with her yellow eyes and angling her head. She turned from him only once, to glare unholy fire at a Reaper of the Cards that swooped too near. It plummeted wrapped in pale flames.

Bakura hesitated as he approached his building; his neighbors regarded him warily enough as it was. Dark Necrofear halted at his side. Overhead, giggling Watapons whirled about like dandelion fluff.

"Thank you again," he said, holding out his arms. "I'll manage from here."

Without any change in her expression, she transferred the bags, then tousled his hair with her cold fingers. She bent to kiss him on the forehead before vanishing.

The spirit laughed at his reaction the entire way up to his flat.

When Bakura kicked the door shut behind him, one of his bags slipped, and he winced as he caught it against the wall with the recently healed area of his arm. The fresh ache followed him and his increasingly precarious load into the kitchen, where his irritation finally boiled over. "This―my arm, I mean―it was somehow your fault, wasn't it?"

"Stop whinging. I didn't sever anything important."

"Wait, you―" He bit his lip and hurried the bags onto the worktop before blurting, "You really did do this to me? On purpose? You put me in hospital! I'm going to have a scar for the rest of my life! It _hurt_ , and you..." He trailed off with the terrible realization that he felt betrayed.

The spirit snorted at him. "Do you think I'd harm this body for nothing? It was necessary."

"Necessary? How could stabbing me be _necessary_?"

"I wouldn't expect you to understand. And anyway, the plan went tits-up when the pharaoh decided to kill you."

That almost certainly wasn't the truth of it, but Bakura remembered nothing except agony and teeth and Yami not calling an end to the duel. The eager malice in Slifer's eyes burned away everything else but the final, strange sensation of the spirit vaulting out into his body and pushing him into the dark, below the reach of pain.

Waking up again, trailed by nightmare-vague impressions of rending and immolation, had come as a surprise. 

"He didn't," Bakura replied with more conviction than he felt. He picked up a tin and watched his knuckles go white around it. "And why did I wake up on top of the blimp? I know they'd got me medical attention, so you must have gone and put me in some other peril."

The spirit made a dismissive noise. "That was Marik's doing, both of him—it was a collaborative cock-up where one had an over-powered card and the other had a crap plan for dealing with it."

This was too hopeless a tangle to unravel all at once, especially while trying to put away groceries purchased in case of apocalypse, but Bakura still found himself asking, "What does any of that even mean? What happened to me?"

"Long story short, we died for a bit."

Every conversation lately seemed to be an exercise in halfway making sense of something, only to watch it explode into fractal nonsense. Bakura sputtered until he managed, "That's not the sort of you thing you do for a bit!"

"It demonstrably is. Take a breath, host."

Rending and immolation and then nothing at all, neither light nor shadow. His arm throbbed. "Really, actually killed? Not just stuck in the Shadow Realm for a bit? No one told—I mean, I reckoned—I made a joke about it when I woke up!"

"The Shadow Realm isn't a metaphysical lock-up, host. It's a bloody euphemism." As Bakura's life become retroactively more horrifying, the spirit added, "Was the joke any good?"

"No!" He was half-surprised the tin hadn't crumpled in his fist. Breathing harshly through his nose, he tried to force his thoughts back in order. "And I suppose getting me killed was necessary too, was it?"

"No, it was the consequence of a crap plan. Pay attention."

Wondering if his psyche would let him get away with leaving the Ring in the freezer overnight, Bakura took out his displeasure by bunging half a dozen tins much too forcefully into the cupboard. When he picked up the seventh, morbid curiosity compelled him to ask, "What other wretched things have you done with my body?"

After a pause, the spirit chuckled languidly. "Marik." 

The tin stuck the floor by way of his foot. "What―you can't seriously―that hurt!" The skipping record needle of his brain settled in a groove, and Bakura wobbled on his good leg as he brought the other up for inspection and coddling. "Ow-ow-ow, that's going to bruise..." Grimacing at the spirit's cackle, he braced his free hand against the worktop. "Listen, don't tease me like that!"

"Like this, then?"

He felt a sudden pressure in his forehead, and after a disorientating tweak Bakura watched the city flash by at dangerous speeds, felt an engine humming between his legs, tasted the sweat on an exposed nape, worked a hand that was not quite his into trousers that were not his at all, and heard a nasal voice snap at him to wait until they'd pulled over.

Bakura froze as if a chilled slug were oozing its way up his back. "You're serious." The slug gained speed. "This is where those scratches―"

In a matter of seconds he was in the shower with the hot water on full-blast. He wished he had thought to grab a pad of wire wool from the kitchen; as it was, he settled for screwing his eyes shut and scrubbing fervently with soap and a flannel, which snagged on the Ring's pointers during every pass over his torso.

The spirit's yawn pulled him out of his trance. "Are you quite finished?"

Raw and scalded, he reluctantly turned the tap towards cold and fumbled the soap back into its dish. The tile wall still felt cool enough to soothe his forehead. Calling upon his vague understanding of Battle City, he asked, "Which Marik was it?"

"Not the one who killed us, obviously." Bakura didn't think this was obvious at all. "The one who chained your classmates to an anchor. You know―" the spirit sniggered― "the _good_ one."

"Oh. Erm. I expect that's why he avoided me on the way back to Domino." Bakura's eyes flew open. "Wait, an anchor?"

"They really don't tell you anything, do they?"

Irritation helped him focus. "They do," he said firmly, reaching down for the shampoo bottle; "it's just that they're rather busy with the God Cards, and I haven't really askyegheh!"

The burst of gibberish came in response to straightening up with a handful of shampoo and discovering that the spirit had manifested on the edge of the bath. Bakura's eyes snapped shut, but the image had already seared itself into his mind―the spirit's appearance matched his own exactly, including his present lack of clothing. An instant later he remembered that the state of the spirit's eyelids did not match his own, and he scrambled blindly to cover himself.

"Don't bother," the spirit said, somewhere between amusement and exasperation. "I've probably seen more of it than you have."

Bakura clutched his flannel in place and forced his voice steady. "Get back inside this instant, or I'll―I'll find something to do with the Ring that you won't like." This, he felt, lacked gravitas. "I'm very serious."

Laughter answered him, but the sound came from within his head. He opened an eye cautiously, taking in the blank white expanse of the bath, as the spirit asked, "What ever became of that gormless git, anyway?"

The need for cover trumped the desire for clean hair. Bakura twisted the taps off as he replied, "Went back to Egypt, I think."

"What, the pharaoh just let him off the hook?"

No one had ever got round to telling Bakura exactly what Marik did, though he'd gathered that something deeply unpleasant had befallen Mai and that the group owed its helicopter ride home to Joey's Marik-induced medical emergency. "He seemed to be getting on with everyone. I expect they patched things up while I was, er, gone."

"Ha! I can tell you how that went." The spirit mimicked a cantankerous Muppet with a head cold: "'Oh, pharaoh, thank you so much for saving me from my evil personality, who was entirely responsible for every bad thing I ever did, even before he took over my body!'" 

"I'm sure I wouldn't know." Bakura toweled off expediently. "Everything was probably your fault."

The spirit cackled again, and went on cackling as he donned his slightly steam-dampened clothes. He cursed its lack of dependence on oxygen. After wiping away a circle of fog from the mirror, he discovered that the spirit had decided to manifest just in front of the glass, muddling his reflection.

"Wait a tick." He paused in the act of wringing out his hair. "You're having me on, aren't you?"

"We've established otherwise."

"All we've established is that you've got a filthy mind and a nasty sense of humor." He bent his head to get at the underside of his hair. "And those scratches might have come from anywhere."

"Anywhere with a manicure, yes."

Bakura applied the towel with more force than necessary before straightening up and shaking his head. His reflection's hair stuck out around the spirit like a damp nimbus.

"Right," he said, "I know how to sort this out." Hair soaking through his shirt, Bakura headed for the kitchen. As he rifled through the miscellaneous scraps in one of the drawers, the spirit drifted in front of him and quirked its eyebrows.

From beneath a stack of takeaway menus he retrieved a branded Kaiba Corp napkin, on the back of which was scrawled a series of digits. Marik had pressed it into Bakura's hand shortly before the helicopter landed in Domino, and he had offered no explanation beyond a mumbled, "Oh, what the hell."

The spirit flickered out long enough to read the numbers through Bakura's eyes, then reappeared with a grin. "Yet you need further evidence, host?"

Setting his jaw, Bakura picked up the phone and dialed. He tried not to think about long-distance charges.

"Hello?" he said in response to a disgruntled noise on the other end. "Marik? This is Bakura. Sorry to—What? ...Right, Bakura. ...No, _I'm_ Bakura, actually; it just goes about using my name sometimes. ...I'm sorry, did I say something wrong?" His cheeks warmed. "Oh. So what time is it for you, then? ...Oh dear, no wonder you're upset, I really ought to have thought of—Yes? My point? Sorry, I'll get right to it."

"Surly little twat, isn't he?" the spirit said with inappropriate cheer. "Call him that and see what he says."

Bakura scowled at it. "Yes, well, there have been certain, er, circumstances brought to light recently, and... Sorry, I _am_ getting round to it, really, it's just somewhat embarrassing to―Come again?"

The spirit drowned out most of Marik's reply: "Tell that wanker he still owes me the Rod, and 'You got it twice last night' wasn't funny the first time."

"Belt up!" Bakura winced and tilted the receiver away from his ear. "Sorry, Marik, I didn't mean you!"

"And this," the spirit said, "is why he's only tolerable when that obnoxious mouth of his is wrapped around―"

A noise like underwater static came out of Bakura's mouth, buying him a moment's bemused silence from the telephone. "Right, then," he said, twisting the coiled lead around his finger. "Other than the, er, dying, would you happen to know if my body did anything during Battle City that I perhaps ought to know about? ...I say, that's a bit rude, isn't it? ...No, honestly, I _am_ the real Bakura. If I weren't, why on earth would I be ringing you to ask―"

The spirit smirked at Marik's response.

"Yes," Bakura said miserably, heart oozing into his feet, "that does describe its sense of humor. I'm terribly sorry to have bothered you―really, you've no idea how sorry―so I'll let you go back to bed, and we'll just agree never to speak of this again, shall we?"

The connection broke with a resounding click.

"I'm going to make tea," Bakura decided aloud, avoiding the spirit's expression, "and I'm going to put bleach in it."

"You'd never."

"I might as well. I'm already going to die of—of syphilis or something."

"Never ruin the tea, I meant."

Bakura collapsed irritably on the sofa and did not deign to reply. As he sank down into a sulk, an impression of something loud and sweaty rolled towards the threshold of his mind. He envisioned slamming a door on it. "Don't you dare!"

"Your loss," the spirit replied tartly. "Maybe you wouldn't be so bloody high-strung if you at least tossed off every―"

" _Why_ are you still talking?"

For a several relatively peaceful seconds, it stopped. Then its face loomed upside-down above him, its pinched expression cut with strands of hair that fell with wild disregard for gravity. "I'm beginning to think you've got some sort of psychological issue, host."

"You're one to talk!"

Squinting as if at a tricky crossword puzzle, the spirit said, "I am older than your civilization. When I last had a physical form, your very language didn't exist. All of which is to say―" it stirred a phantom finger through Bakura's forehead― "that any proclivities I might have now are the result of chemicals sloshing in _your_ brain."

He glared at it before rolling over, burying his face in the gap where the cushion met the back of the sofa.

"But perhaps I've been inconsiderate," the spirit cooed into his ear. "Were you saving yourself for Gary Gygax?"

Bakura grabbed the Ring in what he couldn't pretend was anything but an empty gesture. When the spirit finally stopped laughing, he counted to twenty, took a deep breath, and rolled his face out of the cushion, his fingers still clutching the cord. The spirit had ceased to manifest but felt no less intensely present.

Raising the Ring above him, Bakura watched the pointers sway over his forehead. "This can erase memories, can't it?" he said, letting the Ring dip far enough to brush the metal tips against his skin. The contact made him shiver. "I know it must because Tristan and Téa hadn't the foggiest idea what I was on about when I mentioned Pegasus's floor turning to jelly." 

"I saved your life on that moronic misadventure _and_ spared you inane conversation about it afterwards," the spirit replied. "You're welcome."

"I certainly didn't ask you to." Bakura frowned, turning an implication over in his brain. "Just how many times have you got me killed?"

" _Marik_ got us killed. And only the once, of course."

"Don't say that like I'm the one being unreasonable!" He shook the pointers and went cross-eyed glaring at them. "And I don't believe you. I'm sure you used to erase my memories all the time."

"You wouldn't know," the spirit replied. "But I never did."

"Why should I believe that?"

"Think, host. Why would I bother? It's far simpler to shut you up in your soul room, and I wouldn't want your brain ending up like a wet cheese."

Bakura let the Ring fall. "Er, would it?"

"Presumably, but it's hard to tell if the pharaoh's entourage are any worse for the wear."

"I wish you wouldn't insult my friends." He sat up with a gasp, cutting off the spirit's response. "Oh no, I hope they're all right! Here I've been selfish, rushing home on my own and getting distracted by your... your..." He gave up searching for a noun and headed for the phone.

"'Exploits'?" the spirit suggested. "'Sexual prowess'? And don't bother―they haven't spared you a thought."

Ignoring it, Bakura lifted the receiver from the cradle, dialed the first digit of the game shop's number, and dropped the phone as darkness engulfed his flat.

Belatedly it occurred to him that preparing for a power cut might have been a better use of his time than arguing with the spirit. Counting the fibers in the carpets might have been a better use of his time, for that matter. Muttering, he picked his way to the nearest window and drew apart the curtains, whereupon he discovered that the sun had already dipped below the horizon and that the street lamps were faring no better than the lamps in his flat.

With difficulty, he navigated to the kitchen and felt his way to the rummage drawer. His skin registered the crinkling of paper and the pricking of drawing pins, but nothing large and cylindrical enough to be his target. Bakura drummed his fingers against the bottom of the drawer and asked, "Where's the torch?"

"How the hell should I know?"

A few months ago, he had required its services to retrieve a handful of dice that rolled beneath the sofa. He distinctly recalled returning the torch to the drawer afterwards, and said so.

The spirit snorted at him before making a thoughtful noise. "Was it blue, about a foot long, sturdy enough to make a fair bludgeon?"

The past tense scrubbed out even the stubbornest specks of curiosity. "Very well, then, I suppose I can make do with―"

"It's under the sink." When Bakura hesitated, the spirit added, "I washed it."

"With _candles_ ," he said, pushing the drawer shut. He felt his way across the dark kitchen. "I'm sure I've―"

"Not anymore."

He stopped to lean against the worktop and rub his temples, cursing himself for putting the paracetamol away in the medicine cabinet. Keeping one hand in place to support his head, he groped about with the other until he managed to light one of the rings on the hob. Ghostly blue light flickered over the nearby surfaces.

"I used soap."

"Sod off."

* * *

[Thursday]

He dreamt about Marik, in choreographed detail that must have been the spirit's fault. Waking up before dawn to a continued lack of electricity and a need to change his sheets did not improve Bakura's mood.

After an awkward shower in the dark, he moved into the kitchen, opened the curtains for what little light the sky had to offer, and let kinesthetic memory guide him through the process of putting the kettle on. Tea would help; he was glad he'd never had the heart to buy a proper electric kettle to replace the traditional model his mother left to him. As he waited for it to whistle, he mechanically stacked tins of food on the worktop in a vague effort towards breakfast. Bakura had built half a fort before his brain caught up with his hands.

"Pleasant dreams?" purred the voice in his head.

He came within an inch of knocking tins everywhere. Pinching his forehead, he said, "Go away, go away, go _away_."

"Can't and wouldn't. And you should know that you can't hide your dreams from me, host. They spill over everywhere." It drifted into the midst of his aluminium fort to flash him an insincere smile. "I was asking to be polite."

"That's a laugh." To Bakura's irritation, the spirit's head moved to overlay every label he tried to read. After deciding that this was almost certainly intentional, he reached through its face to grab a random tin and discovered that he would be having stewed tomatoes for breakfast.

The implications of the spirit's claim finally caught up to him as he spooned the tomatoes out in a series of wet scrapes. "Do you really spy on my dreams?"

The spirit nodded unapologetically. "They're unspeakably dull most of the time. Every now and again you have a decent nightmare." With an unpleasant grin, it added, "Then there was that bloody weird one with the elf made of liquorice allsorts."

His spoon clattered against the bowl.

"Explains a lot, I'm sure." The spirit's voice lilted with cheerful sadism. "What healthy lad hasn't fantasized about Bertie Bassett with pointy ears and a wedding tackle?" 

After a distressed pause, Bakura said uncertainly, "You're having me on."

It barked a laugh. "What, you don't remember that one? What about―"

He grabbed the spoon and clanged it against the worktop until he was certain that the sentence had ended. "See here," he snapped, "how would you like it if I went snooping in your subconscious?"

The spirit yawned. "You wouldn't dare."

"I _would_ dare if I had any idea how."

"Surely you can't fool even yourself with that line. Even you aren't so dim that you can't enter the soul room hanging around your own neck."

He opened his mouth to protest and demand clarification, then shut it again. If he focused not on the memory of the inside of his door, but on the darkness beyond, he would surely find himself— 

—not in his own soul room, but in the dark hall curving away on either end, past the gap of the exit. He followed it in a blind semicircle to the right and came upon a jet-black door to what, logically, should have been the back wall of his soul room. It appeared shut, which briefly threw everything he thought he'd worked out about soul rooms into question until he noticed a thin red gap at the top, well out of his reach.

Unable to find anything like a doorknob, Bakura raised a hand to knock and let out a startled shout when his knuckles sank into what he had thought was a stone surface. He snatched his hand away and watched the substance glow red where he had touched it.

"What's the password?" boomed the spirit's voice, layered with echoes in a dozen different pitches. 

Bakura squinted at the bright pattern left by his knuckles, then used his forefinger to write beneath it, "OPEN SESAME."

The spirit made a noise like a quiz-show buzzer.

Scowling, he appended, "YOU GIT."

The door shuddered and slid into the floor with a backing of the spirit's hysterical laughter. Bakura strode forward, then halted as if he had stepped into tar. 

It was wrong inside.

The spirit's soul room looked as if it had once been a room in at least a roughly traditional sense until someone had smeared pitch everywhere and then taken a sledgehammer to the walls. Colors, mostly reds and golds, showed through in jagged gaps, and shadows shifted over them like a python's coils. One corner―and there were corners everywhere, even where geometry forbade―had vanished, leaving a hole that made Bakura's eyes ache when he tried to focus on it.

He took a reflexive step backwards and heard crunching beneath his feet. When he worked up the nerve to see what he had stepped on, he was relieved to find that the floor was covered with sand, not tiny bones, and that the section beneath him was not, at present, churning. He looked up and found the ceiling an oppressive black that seemed to get lower the longer he stared at it, so he dropped his gaze back to a writhing wall.

An unusually solid manifestation of the spirit strode in front of him and flung its arms wide, grinning obscenely. "Welcome! Shall I give you a tour?" With an unhinged laugh, it added, "I should warn you that it's crowded in here."

Before Bakura could ask what it meant, a wispy, bitter-cold force traced a line from his right eye down his cheek. He flailed until his hand caught hold of the nearest surface, which oozed between his fingers. With a yelp, he jerked away. "Blimey, are the walls _bleeding_?"

The spirit grinned and leaned against one, soaking its sleeve with scarlet. Something like a spider skittered up from the sand to lap at the liquid pooling in its palm. "Be careful what you touch. These shadows are always hungry."

In a dripping corner, something glittered in a way that suggested both polished metal and vitreous humor. Bakura stared back at it as he tried to shake his hand clean. The textures on the adjacent walls heaved like breathing chests and began to flow, until they resembled fused lumps of faces. Some of them had teeth.

"I," he said, and needed to stop; he could feel the walls' lips squirming wetly against his skin, ignoring distance. Pride abandoned, Bakura fled through the exit, round the bend, and out into his trembling body. By the count of thirty he was reasonably certain that he wouldn't throw up.

"Indeed, you didn't dare." The spirit manifested in his peripheral vision, smirking. "Why so bothered, host? Usually that sort of thing appeals to your ghoulish streak."

Because this horror had been intimate, clinging to him with a suffocating sense of entitlement. He had an irrational dread that the walls of his own soul room would try to eat him on his next visit. After swallowing and taking a deep breath, Bakura managed, "It bled on me."

The spirit cackled.

Nothing came out of him, but he couldn't imagine putting anything else inside him, either. He spent most of the day by the living room window, gazing restlessly over the distant pandemonium of the city. He didn't bother pretending that he might go back in to look for a way to seal the door. To his relief, the spirit let him alone.

* * *

Late in the afternoon there came a knock at the door.

Bakura's panic survived his efforts to tell himself that anything planning to rampage through his flat was unlikely to have bothered with knocking. He crept halfway to the kitchen, wondering if the torch really would make a fair bludgeon, before deciding that he would be unable to make himself find out. He grabbed his deck, instead, and took it with him to hide behind the sofa. Most of his summoning options looked likely to wreck his flat in the process of defending him. The knocking resumed, louder and faster. 

The spirit growled, manifested, and walked out into the hallway through the wall. It stuck its head back into the living room to yell, "Oi, it's a bloody package!"

"Oh," said Bakura.

He'd assumed the post wouldn't be delivered, nor was he expecting an order of anything. Most of what he received unsolicited came from the same sources as the messages on his answerphone.

With as much curiosity as trepidation, he opened the door and was made to sign a form by a grim-faced woman with no interest in small talk. The little parcel she shoved into his arms weighed more than its size suggested and bore an exciting array of stamps.

Once Bakura had sliced through the tape and twine, he found a thick golden cuff inlaid with heavily stylized figures, along with a plain white card that read, "For your collection. Happy Birthday."

The spirit's spectral hands passed through his, as if to test the weight of the gold. "You're collecting now, are you?"

"No," came out of Bakura's mouth too quickly. He set the cuff down on the table before his trembling arms could drop it. 

"Of course you aren't. You know I'm a jealous god." With a low chuckle, the spirit drifted in front of him and set its hand on the Ring. "Don't trouble yourself over him, host. I know you far better than he'd ever care to."

"Don't. Please." 

It smiled unpleasantly and vanished.

The cuff and card went back into the box, which Bakura sealed as best he could with the remains of the tape. His spare room caught little of the light from the windows, so he had to work mostly by feel to shove it into the back corner of the closet. His hands were still shaking when he lay down on the sofa.

It wasn't his father's fault, he tried to tell himself. It was never anyone's fault—it was always slick roads and staggered junctions, long hours and museum politics, harmless games and no underlying neurological conditions, itchy bones and blind optimism. If it couldn't be helped, it could be buried and well marked, and he had a talent for avoiding swollen places.

Bakura wrote "Thank you" on a sheet of stationery, folded it up in an envelope addressed to his father's office, and summoned Earthbound Spirit to drag it down to the communal letterbox so that he could stop thinking about it.

* * *

The sun set, and still the electricity hadn't returned. Bakura's appetite had, however, so he stubbornly flicked a light switch up and down before giving up and lighting the rings on the hob to navigate the kitchen.

At least the gas still worked. He set two slices of bread in the oven to grill and consulted his collection of tins.

The tomatoes he'd failed to eat for breakfast were probably best thrown out, and he wasn't in the mood for them, regardless. As he debated his options, stomach whining, he gave up convincing himself that he wanted any variety of potted meat and instead allowed himself access to his emergency stash of baked beans—the proper sort of baked beans, not the dreadful syrupy stews that filled the supermarket aisles of Domino. He had trouble imagining a more appropriate time to resort to emergency comfort rations.

In the corner of his eye, the spirit stalked over to the window and leaned through the glass for a better view. Shifting colors shone through its translucent form, mingling eerily with the light from the hob. 

With a shiver, Bakura turned his attention back to opening the tin. 

"Come here," the spirit said at the first sound of parting metal. "You're missing a half-decent apocalypse."

"No." Bakura fumbled the opener and needed to stop for a moment. The cozy scent of baked beans oozed from the tin, which gleamed a sickly yellow-green on the side facing the window. He hoped that, for once, Yugi and the rest weren't caught up in the thick of things.

A noise like a glacier splitting in half rattled the spice rack. Bakura yelped and clutched the edge of the worktop, wincing as a series of lesser explosions punctuated the spirit's laughter. He dug through memories of various disaster drills he had attended over the years, but none covered what to do when an aurora borealis wandered off course and shattered the sky.

With some trepidation, he picked his way to the window and peered through the back of the spirit's head. It flashed him a grin and shifted to allow him a clearer view.

There was a slit in the moon. After a stunned moment Bakura realized that it was not the moon at all; something vast and black canopied the earth, blocking out the stars, and the glowing orb embedded in it was an eye. The vertical pupil dilated as lightning streaked the massive iris.

"What on earth―" Bakura managed before a tornado burst from the pupil and stretched hundreds of feet into the heart of the city, where tall buildings shielded the point of impact from his view. Even with the window closed, the roar of the wind made his ears throb.

A column of fire burst up from below the line of the buildings, piercing the whirlwind in a blast of retina-searing light. Bakura's eyelids twitched shut on reflex. When the noise stopped, he opened them warily and saw that the eye had vanished, the colored lights had returned, and what appeared to be a multitude of shooting stars now cut through the sky.

The spirit clapped slowly before vanishing. "Tch. If you're going to skip the megalomaniacal gloating, you've got to make damned sure the event itself doesn't fizzle. Five-point-two."

Bakura stared blankly at the falling lights, one of which halted not far from his building and resolved itself into a Luster Dragon. He shivered and returned to the tin of beans, taking time out on the way to put the kettle on. Despite not having eaten all day, he didn't feel hungry so much as in dire need of comfort food.

He glanced outside again once he had the tin open. The windows of the neighboring building glowed yellow, but upon investigation, his own light switches remained unresponsive. He tried not to take this personally as he arranged both slices of toast on a plate, applied a generous layer of butter, and scooped the beans over them.

After a brief internal debate, Bakura retrieved the salad cream from his silent fridge. Anything that kept all right in the cupboard, he reasoned, wouldn't kill him after a day without refrigeration. The spirit gagged as he smeared the sauces together.

"Hush, you." He used a fork to flip one half of the sandwich over the other, added more beans on top, and reached for the whistling kettle. Black tea would have to do; the milk was a much riskier proposition.

When he sat down to eat, the spirit materialized to glower at him from across the kitchen table. "I can't believe you're putting that into my body."

" _My_ body," Bakura said around a mouthful of sandwich. Using his knife to cut another piece, he added, "And this is certainly better than anything you've put into it."

The spirit sniggered. 

He froze with his fork half-raised, dripping orange sauce back down on the plate, as he struggled against his own imagination. With a morose sigh, he set down the bite and rested his forehead in his hand. "I thought about it."

"I might have been thinking of raw beef," the spirit said with no attempt at sincerity.

"Brilliant. Now I can die of syphilis _and_ E. coli."

"Not so long as you have this." At the lower edge of Bakura's vision, the spirit ran its fingers insubstantially through the pointers of the Ring. "Have you ever been seriously ill since I came to you? Didn't you notice how slowly your arm healed without me?" Its hand flattened over and through his chest. "You don't know how to harness the Ring's power, but I can make you a vessel truly worthy of a god."

With a shiver of disgust, Bakura pushed his chair back from the table. "You can't go five minutes without being creepy, can you?" he said, and didn't wait for a response as he opened the cabinet where he kept his supplements. The bottle failed to rattle.

"Blast!" He shook it upside-down in case any tablets were stuck to the bottom. "I can't believe I forgot."

The spirit flitted through the worktop and cocked its head in an effort to see what had drawn Bakura's displeasure. It narrowed its eyes. "Host, are you a drug addict?"

"What? No!" He turned the bottle in his hand to show the spirit the label. "It's St. John's Wort. I wasn't doing well once the pills I got from the hospital ran out―I couldn't even sleep―and they wouldn't give me anything else unless I scheduled an appointment with a psychiatrist, and I knew that wouldn't end at all well, so I asked the chemist―" The spirit's annoyed look sank in. "Anyway, these worked a treat, and they're probably the only reason you haven't driven me completely round the bend yet."

The spirit snorted. "You were round the bend when I found you."

"It's your fault for distracting me all the time." Bakura set the empty bottle down with a sigh. "I'd rather have forgotten the paracetamol."

With an unsettling smile, the spirit approximated patting him on the shoulder. "Well, do try to sleep. I expect your dreams will be especially entertaining tonight."


	4. Fool

[Friday]

When Bakura woke, he found the spirit manifested on the foot of his bed like a cat waiting for breakfast. "Good morning, host," it said with unnerving cheer.

He squinted at his alarm clock, which was still dark, then at the spirit. Outside, something squawked eerily. "What's particularly good about it?"

"It's your birthday, isn't it? Obviously I'm in no position to give you a present―" it said this with less resentment than he expected― "but perhaps I can offer you something to take the edge off your boredom." 

He yanked his blanket defensively up to his chin. "Don't you dare tell me what I dreamt about."

"Wasn't planning to do. It's your birthday. What do you want?"

Bakura tried to convince himself that it was fortunate his father hadn't visited, after all, and found that he couldn't begin to process his feelings before tea. "I really don't want anything."

"You always want things. You're a miserable little fount of yearning."

"From you, I meant." Ignoring the spirit's miffed noise, he rolled out of bed and set himself on a course for the kitchen.

As he took stock of his breakfast options, Injection Fairy Lily flew floated past the window and waved, her syringe sparkling in the morning sun. Bakura waved uncertainly back and put the kettle on.

"I see your manners are selective today," the spirit remarked. He ignored it in favor of grilling bread in the oven. 

The spirit followed him through the process of arranging his toast on a plate, brewing his tea, and settling in at the kitchen table with a soft stick of butter and a jar of Marmite. It sat opposite him on a non-existent chair, elbows intersecting the table.

Bakura got through buttering the toast before feeling compelled to ask, "What do you _think_ I want from you?"

"My companionship on your terms, of course. Don't try to deny it; I know you've got at least a shred of self-awareness." The spirit smiled crookedly. "That's why I thought we might work on a new campaign together."

He stilled with his knife above the jar. "What are you scheming?"

"I'm _bored_ , host. I've been shut up in your head for a week without so much as a chance to stretch my legs. An impartial observer might call that cruel."

"Only if you leave out the bit where you lied to me and tried to take over my body." Scraping the Marmite over his toast, he added, "And you're evil."

The spirit rolled its eyes and returned to watching him in intent silence. Bakura decided his breakfast was best enjoyed while gazing out the window, where a flock of Happy Lovers was cheerfully terrorizing a sparrow.

"Do you know," the spirit said, apropos of nothing, "the first interesting thing you ever did?"

Bakura swallowed a mouthful of toast. "I'm not inclined to trust your judgment."

"You were so new that I was still getting used to the fit of you," it continued as if he hadn't said anything. "Your father rang to ask how you liked your present, and you didn't breathe a word of how troubled you were by lost time. You weren't so dense that you hadn't noticed; I was poised to seal your lips. Yet you considered it your secret to keep." With a low chuckle, the spirit added, "And then you wrote it all down and addressed it to your dead sister."

Holding his mug steady at his lips, Bakura tried not to think about the drawer filled with unsendable letters. "That's it?"

"I thought, 'Delightfully morbid little tosser, isn't he?'" The spirit paused. "Actually, I thought, 'Golly, he's queer.' Your vocabulary was lacking."

"You make me sound like something out of an Enid Blyton book."

"You do a fine job of that on your own." The spirit got in the way of the glass. "My point is that you proved yourself the vessel I was due."

He choked on a sip of a tea. "Is that your idea of a compliment?"

"Nothing so frivolous. If you want flattery for your birthday, you'll have to ask for it."

With a huff, Bakura tucked back into his toast. He finished it and his tea before saying, "You know what I _do_ want? Cake."

The spirit drifted behind him as he set about washing up. "Go on dreaming big, host," it drawled. "Reach for the bloody sugarplum stars."

"Hush up."

Nothing perishable in the fridge could be relied upon, but if mayonnaise could substitute for eggs in a pinch, Bakura reasoned that salad cream could do just as well. He had used up most of the flour during his baking spree, but there was enough left for half a batch of fairy cakes. Hot chocolate mix stood in roughly for cocoa powder. With minimal creativity, he had batter. To his pleasant surprise, he also had a few paper cases left.

He had put the pan in the oven and set the timer before it occurred to him that the spirit had been quiet for rather a long while. When he crossed the living room to his bookshelves, it manifested on the sofa and watched him idly. He kept it in the corner of his eye as he retrieved his box of Duel Monsters cards. The deck he'd built before Duelist Kingdom remained where he'd left it, untouched, when he'd decided to build a new deck untainted by the memory of the spirit.

Of course, the spirit hadn't wasted any time tainting that one, too. Bakura sat on the end of the sofa opposite the spirit and began setting out the cards on the coffee table in order of Arcana. White Magic Hat was conveniently near the top; he had to go hunting for the Lady of Faith.

When the spirit shifted closer to watch, he said, "I based this deck on the tarot."

"I know. The Morphing Jar was a clever choice for Death." As Bakura braced himself for a comment about feeding people to it, the spirit added, "The Arcana dress up the trauma of change in death's clothing, to create the illusion that conquering the fear of the unknown is the same as taming the darkness. Amusing, isn't it, how mortals grasp at mastery through metaphors?"

This was too philosophical for so early in the morning, particularly considering the source, so Bakura ignored it. When one of the deck's Morphing Jars came up, he set it in what would become the second row. Chain Energy as Temperance went after it, followed by the Seven-Armed Fiend.

Tutting, the spirit tapped a finger through it. "Your Devil's too on the nose."

That the card had come packaged with the Ring initially meant nothing sinister to Bakura; later, it became one more reason to shut the entire deck up in a box. Deciding he didn't actually want to know if the card and the spirit shared any deeper connection, he replied, "It's a fair cop," replaced the card with Pot of Greed, and returned to searching the deck for the rest of the Arcana. 

Happy Lover and Yomi Ship slotted next to each other into the first row of cards. Leaving a space for Justice, he set Electric Lizard as the Hermit, followed by Change of Heart.

Wheel of Fortune had seemed a perfect fit for it, once upon a time; now he was half-tempted to make it the Hanged Man and see if the spirit made a crack about the illustration traditionally being styled after a traitor's portrait. After confirming that he had a Graceful Dice card to substitute, he slid Change of Heart to the left of the Morphing Jar.

The spirit watched and slanted its eyebrows. "You sell yourself short, host. Budge it over to Strength."

Bakura stared at it. When it only stared back inscrutably, he pinched Change of Heart between his fingers and set it down to the left of White Magic Hat, at the edge of the table.

There were no barbs in the spirit's laugh. "Mind the cliff, then, since there's no little Rider-Waite dog in the artwork to look after you."

He collapsed the cards fanned out in his hand. "You're very nearly behaving yourself," he remarked, unable to keep the suspicion out of his tone.

The spirit shrugged expansively. "My companionship on your terms. It _is_ your birthday."

A "thank you" rolled uncertainly around Bakura's mouth until he swallowed it. The timer showed less than a minute until it beeped, so he took the excuse to retreat to the kitchen and remove the fairy cakes from the oven. They looked and smelled reassuringly edible.

When he returned to finish sorting the Arcana, the spirit said, "Why don't I do a reading for you?"

Frowning, Bakura set Just Desserts in place as Justice. Several whys sprang to mind, beginning with the spirit's inability to touch the cards, though he supposed it was polite to let the querent do most of the handling. And it had, so far, behaved.

He waited until he'd set the last of the Arcana before replying, "If you promise not to be creepy about it."

"No creepier than the fates demand. Shuffle and cut."

The cards felt small and strange for tarot; Bakura felt as if he were about to play Duel Monsters at an eighteen-card disadvantage.

"Now deal three," the spirit said, floating to the opposite side of the coffee table. "Past, present, and future."

"Right, I know how this works." He set them like trap cards. "Starting from my left?" At the spirit's nod, he turned over a Man-Eater Bug.

"Ah, the Tower! The world has cracked apart beneath you and shown its teeth." The spirit showed its own teeth in a slanted grin. "My sympathies, host. I do know how it feels to have a plan go disastrously awry."

"And you do realize it's usually your fault."

It waved a hand dismissively. "You know, there are those who hold that the Tower always refers to imminent disaster, no matter where it appears in the timeline. You might consider this a warning that the seeds of ruin have been sown." It held Bakura's gaze a moment before adding, "Would you let a dragon eat you to spite me?"

"Don't be daft. That's quite enough of the past, I think." He flipped the center card, which revealed itself to be an upside-down Mask of Darkness.

The spirit chuckled. "And now the Moon's reversed itself to tell you that your inner voice is bollocks."

"And deceptive, as well," Bakura replied. "Maybe my shadow's having one over on me."

"Be a good querent and leave the reading to me." The spirit leaned in over the cards. "From the look of it, you're too tangled up in past traumas to see clearly now. You cling to the rubble over a fault line and ignore the ominous shifting of the earth. Now, shall we expect any improvement?"

Warily, he flipped the final card. Doma the Angel of Silence smirked up at him.

The spirit nodded approvingly. "Judgment speaks to a decision you've yet to make, or perhaps one already sewn up for you." One of its fingers tapped through the Man-Eater Bug. "But I'm an optimist when it comes to you, host. No doubt you'll be able to tell the difference when the inexorable moment arrives."

Bakura watched it for a moment to see if it had anything else to add. "Well," he said at length, "that was... I don't know what I expected that to be."

"Enlightening?" the spirit suggested.

The fairy cakes had surely cooled enough. He excused himself to the kitchen to mix what was left of the icing sugar with water and the last few drops of vanilla extract. The result was unimpressive but sweet enough. As he drizzled a festive sheen, the spirit watched and said, "Those don't look half-bad."

"Thank you?"

"That was meant as a compliment." The spirit stuck a spectral finger into the thin stream of icing, lending it a band of iridescence. "Even an apocalypse hasn't stopped you baking. You're highly resourceful when it comes to pudding."

That had sounded less like a compliment the longer it went on, but there was no abject mockery in the spirit's tone. If anything, it struck him as wistful. Flustered, Bakura replied, "Well, I've had to learn to be adaptable."

The spirit smiled crookedly. "Like flu?"

Feeling increasingly as if he'd lost control of the conversation, he peeled back the paper case from one of the cakes and took a bite. It really wasn't half-bad. Another victory for salad cream, which he made a mental note to order in bulk. After disposing of the empty case, he reached for a second fairy cake and briefly, confusingly locked eyes with the spirit. It still looked wistful.

He hesitated, hand hovering over the cakes, then closed his eyes and drifted into his soul room. The walls remained reassuringly normal. Through his window on the outside world, he watched his fingers flex and curl.

"Go on," he said. "Try one."

The spirit rubbed the pad of his thumb against each fingertip before picking up a fairy cake, which filled Bakura's vision for rather a long time. He was on the verge of offering a reminder not to eat the paper when the spirit raised his other hand, peeled the case back almost delicately, and bit off half the cake. A muted impression of chocolate reached him.

Popping the rest of the cake into his mouth, the spirit sauntered to the window, no doubt leaving a trail of crumbs. Before Bakura had decided whether to scold it, it began to scrape the paper against his teeth.

He chose to feel flattered. "You can have another if you like."

With a short laugh, the spirit opened the window and let the wet paper flutter away on the breeze. Ignoring Bakura's complaint about littering, it raised his arm and bristled the fine hairs with his breath. It shivered contentedly. "It really does feel good in here."

That hadn't ever been flattering. "Mind my hands," he said, "or you're going right back inside."

"I'm only stretching," it replied, bending to tap Bakura's fingers against his toes. As the spirit straightened up, it twined his arms behind his back. "Nervy little thing, aren't you?"

"With good reason."

The spirit laughed again, bringing his hands up to brush his hair out of his face. "You could come out to keep an eye on me."

Whilst Bakura had always found the view a bit nauseating when the spirit controlled his gaze, which was at present flitting with undue interest over the spice rack, being plucked out and pressed into a playing card had soured him on out-of-body experiences. He still had nightmares in which he slipped slowly from his skin, and no one could hear him crying for help.

"I'll stay where I am, thank you," he said crisply. "Just behave yourself."

"I haven't got much choice in the matter. You won't let me do anything fun." 

The spirit's tone was too light to be bitter, but Bakura's reply still came out defensively: "I just don't want you hurting people or doing unspeakable things with my body, is all. You must have some hobbies that don't involve one or the other."

"I considered macramé, but supplies were a bit hard to come by inside the Ring."

If it really was as ancient as it claimed to be, Bakura wondered how much time it had spent without a body to commandeer. He had no intention of asking; he didn't want to hear how the spirit ranked him against anyone else who had been unfortunate enough to play host to it, and he certainly didn't want to hear anything that might make him feel sorry for it. He was unsettled enough by its unmalicious frolicking.

As the spirit tossed a tin of beans from hand to hand, Bakura said, "I've got some more sweets you can try."

The tin hit the floor, and the spirit made no move to pick it up. "Bloody bottomless sugar pit, aren't we. What sort of sweets?"

"Liquorice allsorts. I've got half a bag left over from before you completely put me off them. Look in the cupboard behind―don't you dare play with the cooker!"

It rolled his eyes away from the knobs.

Once it had retrieved the bag of allsorts, knocking over everything else in the cupboard in the process, the spirit returned to the living room and sprawled along the length of the sofa. It propped up a leg on the backrest. Picking out one of the orange sandwiches, it asked, "What is the point of these, host?"

"The point is liquorice, mostly. Some of them have got coconut in."

The spirit popped the sandwich into his mouth and did not seem terribly impressed, though it did go back in for another. "The brown ones are the least offensive," it decided, having thirds.

Bakura chose to interpret this as high praise. "Try one of the pink circles with the black centers."

It did so and hummed ambiguously. Without prompting, the spirit tried one of the blue buttons next. "What the hell is this?"

"Sugar balls on aniseed jelly."

At the lower edge of his vision, Bakura watched the spirit stick out his tongue in exaggerated disgust. It reached into the bag again and fished out one of the five-layer sandwiches, which it pinched speculatively between his thumb and forefinger.

"That's my favorite," he said. "You've got to peel it apart and eat the layers one at a time."

"Have I, now?"

"It's more fun that way."

The spirit did not sound moved. "So it's exactly like the other sandwiches."

"More or less," Bakura conceded, "but there are _five_."

After a pause, the spirit snorted and began to dismantle the sweet. When it popped the first layer of coconut paste into his mouth, the spirit arched his back and breathed heavily, writhing against the sofa. It lowered his eyelids with a moan.

"You had better not be doing what I think you're doing."

The spirit cackled. "What, taking the piss? Where's your sense of humor?"

"Right," Bakura said, marching back out into his body, "that's it, then."

When it manifested, the spirit looked as if it had just tumbled out of a clothes dryer. It rubbed its elbow and, with an aggrieved sigh, blew its fringe out of its eyes. "Would it kill you to be a bit gentler?"

"What, just like all the times you gently shoved me into my soul room?"

"I _was_ gentle," it snapped. "Set you nice and easy on the carpet."

"And then you very gently stabbed me in the arm and _got me killed_."

"Are you still on about that?"

"Yes!"

"Then next time I'll involve you in the plan and ask if you've got any clever alternatives."

This took Bakura sufficiently off-guard that it took him several seconds to work his way round to, "No, you won't, because there won't be a next time."

Contriving to look long-suffering, the spirit perched on the general idea of the coffee table with its chin on its fist. "Why must you assume you'd find any plan of mine objectionable? Some of them involve Monster World campaigns." The last of which had been highly objectionable, though it had adapted well enough to harmless fun. Bakura was still puzzling through whether to point this out when the spirit added, "Anyway, the taste of physicality was appreciated. I've been craving it."

"You're, er, welcome." Against all odds, the conversation had got weirder. Bakura worried his lower lip between his teeth before saying, "I think I need a lozenge. Doesn't it hurt, doing that voice with my throat?" 

No response was forthcoming. Bakura spared a sad glance for the empty bottle of St. John's Wort as he located a bag of lozenges in the cupboard. With a mouthful of medicinal cherry flavoring, he headed for the bathroom, pausing only to say, with more hint of a challenge than he intended, "I'm going to have a shower now."

He was not followed, nor did the spirit pop up midway through shampooing to unsettle him. Strange how performing his ablutions without an audience felt novel now. He took his time toweling off and staring at himself in the mirror, uncertain what he was looking for in his reflection, then put on clean pajamas. It wasn't as if he expected to go outside for the foreseeable future.

Back in the living room, he found the spirit vaguely on the windowsill, feet disappearing into the wall, staring outside. Bakura peered along its line of sight but couldn't see anything more interesting than drawn curtains and an empty nest that appeared to have been built of Kuriboh fluff. The spirit glanced at him and shrugged lightly.

It was, more or less, behaving.

After a moment's consideration, Bakura ventured into his spare room, where the light from the living room windows scarcely reached. He fumbled through boxes in the near-dark until he found the one full of crafting supplies. Once he'd lugged it out to the coffee table, he asked, "What sort of campaign?"

The spirit hummed its approval and manifested beside him. "Something intricate and elaborate. Just the thing to take your mind off being holed up in your flat and missing all the fun outside."

"You do realize I'm not put out about not being in the thick of mortal danger?" 

"So I've heard from you." It gave him a smugly dubious look, which he elected to ignore. "Regardless, the situation is inspirational, wouldn't you say? A world steeped in magic, on the brink of catastrophe, where a chosen few summon monsters to do battle and the rest are scurrying prey."

Bakura's interest waned. "So far it sounds just like the Reign of the Dark Lord expansion."

The spirit scoffed. "There's far more to it than that."

After several seconds of waiting politely, he prompted, "And the rest of it is...?"

"I'm not going to spoil it for you."

"I can't see how this is going to work if you don't."

"Create the components I require, and I'll run you through it." The spirit gave him a smile that might almost have been stolen from his reflection, with no more than trace amounts of malice. "I can be a fair game master. Obviously it will go more smoothly if you're willing to cede control of the body—"

" _My_ body," Bakura interrupted, "and there must be a less creepy way for you to ask for that." He paused. "And we'll see."

The spirit's smile persisted. "That we shall. You enjoy sculpting great billowy robes, don't you? How are you at great billowy capes?"

A surprising quantity of Kneadatite went into transforming a basic magician figurine into a character so swathed in fabric that even the head demanded its own tiny cape. The spirit insisted on impractical amounts of gold jewelry, as well. This was meant to be a fancy wizard, Bakura supposed, or perhaps the high priest of a state religion. He elected not to point out that both roles were well-represented in Reign of the Dark Lord scenarios.

The spirit looked his work over critically before nodding. "Now, the robes are all white, and the jewelry—"

"It has to cure before I can paint it," Bakura interrupted, setting aside the figurine, "but I can do palettes now for reference."

"Jewelry's all gold," the spirit continued as he got his paints out. "Mix up a browner skin tone than you use for Monster England."

That was different, at least; Monster World settings seldom got more exotic than vaguely Spanish. "Where's this set, then? Monster Sicily?"

"I told you I'm not going to spoil it for you. Browner."

Bakura hesitated. "It's not Monster India, is it? Only there was an official expansion along those lines, and it was a tad racist."

" _Host_."

Once he'd got the shade to an approved duskiness, he asked, "What's next?"

More robes, mostly. By the time the sun sank out of usefulness, he'd crafted four, including one female variant and one that condensed the top half of the robe into a sash. Detailing exaggerated pectoral muscles was at least a change of pace, though Bakura had to endure multiple complaints from the spirit about his reluctance to sculpt nipples.

"Tell me that's the last of the robes," he said as he tidied up by twilight.

"The white ones, anyway." The spirit remained near the drying figurines, studying them with an almost flattering intensity. It turned its face long enough to flash him a curl of a smile. "Tomorrow we'll get to the interesting bits."

* * *

[Saturday]

The alarm clock blinked perpetual midnight. Bakura blinked back at it, then broke into a grin as he turned on the bedside lamp. He had no idea what time it was—before dawn, clearly—but all that mattered was that it was time to flood his flat with electricity.

With decreasingly quiet giddy noises, he set about flipping every light switch, taking particular delight in dispelling the gloom of the loo. It had just occurred to him that he might be loud enough to disturb his neighbors when the spirit asked from inside his head, "Afraid of the dark, are we?"

" _Tired_ of the dark." He paused to drink in the sight of his gleaming kitchen. "I'm going to microwave something and watch telly."

"Mind your lofty goals don't dizzy you in the achieving."

"Hush up, it's too early for you."

After a quick check that the previous day's figurine work held up under incandescent light, Bakura set about methodically testing his appliances. The video lit up; the television encouraged him to ring a woman with enormous hair to place an order for a blender. 

In the kitchen, the fridge hummed reassuringly. Opening it confirmed that the little light had returned but also released a whiff of spoilage.

After some thought, he fetched his deck and summoned a Morphing Jar, which settled in at his feet like a dog hoping for table scraps. The spirit manifested to watch with audible amusement; Bakura ignored it as he sent the milk to its doom. The Morphing Jar gobbled and grinned its appreciation.

"Right," he said, adding the carton of eggs. "I reckon a landfill can't make it any worse inside."

The spirit chuckled. "Most of what I've fed it is biodegradable."

"Yes, thank you, I'd worry if you went an hour without saying something horrible."

Two packages of dodgy luncheon meat, a slimy chunk of cheese, and the soggy contents of the freezer rounded out the Morphing Jar's meal. "That's all," he told it, brushing his empty palms together. "Thank you."

The Morphing Jar spun in place and vanished. Next had to come a thorough cleaning, so Bakura tucked the Ring inside his pajama shirt and gathered supplies. As he wet a sponge, the spirit said from behind him, "Just soap up a Kuriboh and set it loose in there."

He frowned. "That seems a bit, I don't know, taking advantage?"

The spirit drifted in front of him with a withering look. "You realize you hold mastery over your own cards, don't you? You're meant to take advantage."

"I really don't think that follows." Ignoring its contemptuous noise, Bakura opened the fridge door, wrinkled his nose at the lingering odor, and went to consult his collection of cards. At the spirit's snigger, he said, "Don't misunderstand. I'm looking for an option that isn't demeaning." 

Eventually he happened upon Water Omotics, the flavor text of which suggested that the vaguely elfin creature depicted in the artwork could bend water to her will. "Like this, see?" he said to the spirit. Without giving it time to respond, he summoned the monster into the kitchen.

"Now if you don't mind," Bakura began, "my fridge..." He trailed off, a blush blooming in his cheeks as his gaze retreated from the manifested Water Omotics to the artwork on her card. "Sorry, I didn't expect you to be quite so, er, undressed. May I offer you a robe?"

Water Omotics burbled a laugh that was nearly drowned out by the spirit's snort. She raised her jar overhead and tipped it, releasing a stream of water that obeyed gravity only briefly before curving upwards into the sinuous shape of a dragon. It shimmered around her like a ribbon before flowing into the fridge with a watery little roar. When it emerged, discoloring grot floated inside it. Water Omotics pointed to the sink, and the dragon obligingly flowed down the drain.

"Thank you," Bakura said. "I'll just let you get back to, er, whatever it is you were doing."

With a jiggly curtsy, Water Omotics disappeared. Bakura let the fridge cool his face for a moment before shutting the door, then busied himself putting the kettle on and microwaving a bag of popcorn. The first hint of dawn appeared outside the window as he carried his breakfast into the living room, where the television was blaring a debate about whether the Fiend Krakens taking up residence around Liberty Island constituted a terrorist attack. A ticker along the bottom of the screen indicated that every school in Domino had canceled classes indefinitely.

As he passed the windowsill where he'd left the figurines, the spirit asked inside his head, "Are those ready to be painted?"

"It's best to let green stuff cure for twenty-four hours."

"So you'll do more sculpting first?"

Bakura set his bowl of popcorn on the coffee table. "In a bit. I can't very well work on anything while I'm eating."

When he fed _The Horror of Fang Rock_ into the video, he was subjected to no opinions about it. He took his time settling in on the sofa, balancing the popcorn bowl in his lap. The spirit manifested on the end opposite him and watched the television with expressions that, whenever he glanced at it, ranged from neutral to amused. The only sounds came from the television and Bakura's own munching.

At the end of the first episode, he paused the tape to return his empty bowl to the kitchen. The spirit remained on the sofa. When he returned, bearing sculpting supplies and a second cup of tea, its gaze followed him back to his seat, mildly expectant.

"We can get started after I finish my tea," he offered.

"Fair enough."

There hadn't been any detectable hint of sarcasm. He frowned slightly over his mug. "It's not my birthday anymore."

The spirit shrugged. "What of it?"

With a shrug of his own, Bakura turned his attention back to watching the serial's doomed characters establish themselves. In the lull before the murders began, he swallowed the last of his tea and said, "Let's get any more white robes out of the way first."

The spirit shifted nearer. "Chin up, host. _This_ robe's half-blue."

He worked slowly, attention split variably between his customizations and the television. The spirit restricted its commentary to the figurine's design, although each on-screen death elicited a small pleased noise. Over the third episode's credits, after the Doctor's horrified declaration that he had trapped everyone inside the lighthouse with a monster, the spirit asked, "Has this one got a high body count?"

"This is one where only the Doctor and his companion come out alive, yes."

"Splendid." After a pause, it added, "Is that Leela woman ever going to stab anyone with that knife?"

Bakura considered. "Not in this particular serial."

"Pity."

"I wish I knew what happened to my tapes of _The Talons of Weng-Chiang_."

The spirit appeared to genuinely enjoy the escalating character deaths, offering occasional advice and encouragement to the Rutan Scout interspersed with mockery of its true form as a glowing jellyfish. When Bakura, preemptively regretting his curiosity, asked what the spirit looked like when it wasn't looking like him, it laughed and replied, "Incalculably more impressive."

Bakura's imagination offered up a buff, fanged jellyfish squatting in his brain. "That isn't much of an answer."

"Recall that 'impressive' is a synonym for 'well-endowed.'"

"No, it's—never mind, forget I asked."

When the end credits rolled, the spirit drifted lower to the coffee table and peered critically at the figurine in progress. "Not bad so far. The hair's still too short in the back. Fringe should be thicker, too." As Bakura pinched off more putty, it said, "Never mind, just put a poncy hat on him and give him that face Kaiba pulls when you stop him playing with his dragon."

He halted mid-knead. "This _is_ Kaiba."

"Four-fifths of him, give or take."

Pinching his lip between his teeth, Bakura set down the putty. "You," he began, voice thick with venom, and had to stop to steady his breathing. His self-control quivered like a rubber band pulled taut.

"What's got your knickers in a twist this time?"

"You're _not_ just bored!" Bakura swept his hand over the table and scattered his supplies, to the noisy displeasure of the spirit. "You―you're trying to―" Realizing that he didn't want to know the specifics, he leapt to his feet and ran for the telephone. "I'm going to warn Yugi about you, and you're going back in the box, and I don't care how much it hurts!"

From within his mind, the spirit gave an impression of mild irritation that did not, in Bakura's opinion, reflect an understanding of the situation. He chewed his lip as he dialed the number for the game shop.

Yugi's grandfather answered with a cheerful assurance that the shop was observing normal business in a minimally dangerous neighborhood, and politeness dictated that Bakura not interrupt until he had been asked how he could be helped.

"Er, yes," he said, keeping his anger and worry on reserve, "may I speak to Yugi Moto, please?"

He was apologetically informed that Yugi had gone away on a trip. The little pauses might have been imperceptible to anyone not listening for them. 

Of course he hadn't been invited. It wasn't right for him to expect to be invited. "No," Bakura replied dully to an offer to take a message, "that won't be necessary, thank you."

As he replaced the receiver, the spirit chuckled. "They aren't your friends."

Rejoinders fought for space on Bakura's tongue, most of them variations on "Only because of _you_ ," but none sounded entirely convincing. With a long sigh, he lay down on the sofa and fingered the outline of the Ring beneath his shirt. "You aren't, either," was truer but even less productive; in the end he replied, "I know."

"Then you're somewhat more perceptive than I've given you credit for." When Bakura didn't respond, the spirit's scowling face appeared before him. "Cease this pathetic moping. You will return to your work and show me more of the droll man with the scarf."

"I haven't got any more serials with the Fourth Doctor," Bakura said before the sense of surrealism wore off. His fists clenched. "And that doesn't matter, because I won't help you hurt them."

"Your cooperation doesn't matter. You can't roll high enough this time to pass your saving throw." A dark purr of amusement ran beneath the spirit's voice: "Haven't you noticed your modifier diminishing?"

He shot it an annoyed look. "Go and be mad somewhere else. I'm very cross with you."

"Oh, but you misunderstand, host." The spirit loomed. "Poor, daft, blinkered host. Did you stop wondering why? Have you already taken it for granted?" Bakura's efforts to shoo it away accomplished nothing. "Tell me, host. Besides drugging you cheerful, what does St. John's Wort do?"

"I told you to go away."

"I asked you a question." Its lips peeled back too far from its teeth. "Think, think! What else is it good for?"

"I don't know, bees?"

The spirit let out a chuckle so low that it was almost a growl. "You know this, host. _Think_."

The image flashed like a warning beacon in his brain: a splash page in the Monster World _Magical Medicines_ supplement, showcasing an impossibly buxom white wizard pinning yellow sprigs to a tent. Bakura's mouth went dry. 

"As a ward," he said wretchedly. The Ring grew hot against his chest. "Against―"

"Evil spirits." The laughter in his head resonated like a gong.

Desperation shot his hands towards the Ring, but he hadn't even caught the cord before pain bloomed in his chest and toppled him out of consciousness.

* * *

When his eyes opened, he immediately closed them again and tried to take deep, calming breaths, or at least not frantic gulps of air. It was probably weeks, if not months, later, and his clothes would be bloodstained, his rent unpaid, his friends' souls trapped in dolls and their heads stashed in the freezer...

Imagination having equaled any possible waking horrors, Bakura gingerly parted his eyelids. A tiny dragon peered back at him. After a dazed moment, he realized that was lying on his side on a blue carpet, and he shivered into a sitting position amidst a confusion of RPG paraphernalia. His heart continued to hammer at his sternum.

It occurred to him that he had sat on something uncomfortable. A moment's digging unearthed a four-sided die, which he rolled between his fingers. "Right," he said at last. "My soul room."

"And an untidy soul room it is," the spirit said from somewhere behind him. He pricked his palm on another stray die as he turned to find it solid and leaning, arms crossed and mouth curled, against the door jamb. It nudged a pile of books with its foot. "You must have a great deal on your mind."

Sarcasm volunteered for duty, but Bakura couldn't see any good in deploying it against someone who had expressed an interest in evicting him from his own body and who had probably come to gloat before doing so. He dug his fingers into the carpet to stop their trembling. "What have you done?"

"Why so worried, host?" The spirit grinned like a shark. "Aren't we partners?"

Definitely gloating. Bakura's mind splintered into possibilities: he might be stoned with the contents of his own soul room, or fed to something in the spirit's soul room, or sealed into a card and torn to pieces―

Something thumped into his temple. Wincing, he pressed his hand to the sore spot and dislodged a red percentile die from his hair.

"Creative," the spirit said, rattling a handful of what Bakura assumed were more projectiles, "but we have more important matters to attend to. Come here."

His imagination flashed up images of his white mage figurine blackening in the oven.

The handful of dice clattered together on their way to the floor. "For fuck's sake," the spirit muttered, and Bakura had scarcely begun to scurry away when its hand seized the front of his shirt. He flinched as he was hauled upright.

The spirit narrowed its eyes, inducing further flinching, and made an exasperated noise. "You're my _host_. I'm not going to kill you."

It abruptly let go. Bakura's feet scrambled for balance; once he had their support, he tried to assemble a coherent question from his thoughts, most of which had shifted from envisioning his demise to wondering how many other shoes were about to drop.

With a smile that was not entirely malevolent, the spirit said, "We'll consider your wild oats sown. Now come."

Maybe his friends' heads really were in the freezer. Shoulders hunched, he followed the spirit into the darkened hall, where he hesitated at the exit. The spirit grunted and shoved him out.

Bakura stumbled; none of his conceptions of the future had involved his ever being in control of his body again. Catching himself against the wall, he discovered that he was back in his spare room. His heartbeat stuttered when he saw the figurine cases arranged on the table.

The spirit's voice filled his head: "Look inside."

When he moved tentatively to do so, sharp pain in his chest made him wince. Five crimson splotches soaked through his shirt.

"Just re-establishing things," the spirit said without a hint of apology. "Now look in the cases."

Warily, he reached into the nearest and picked up the figurine of a girl whose name he couldn't remember. He stared at it, battling the urge to ask what the point of this was, then realized that her eyes were blank and her form was cold in his hand. He peered into each case, one by one, and his breath caught in his throat when he found every gaze empty.

"You―" Bakura collected himself, moistened his lips― "put them back?"

He felt a sharp mental smirk. "I released them. Whether they've still got bodies to return to isn't my concern."

_You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here,_ rang in Bakura's head, though he had been in that sort of venue only once, briefly and illegally, with a friend who became a half-elf. He wondered what happened to homeless souls: were they still drifting over the ocean, blissfully unaware that they might find nowhere to rest? Would they fade away, or linger as ghosts? 

__"Ghosts, indeed," the spirit said with a strange, cold gravity. Its phantom form appeared cross-legged atop the table. "In the end, there will no longer be a veil between the living and the dead. There will be nothing hot, nothing solid, nothing made of or shaped by flesh. Only ghosts." A distortion rippled over its face as a growl flecked its voice. "Only shadows."_ _

__In the next instant Bakura wasn't certain that anything had been out of the relative ordinary. Palms sweating, he returned the empty figurine to the case and asked, "Why?"_ _

__"I grant wishes," the spirit replied with a terrible brightness, and Bakura felt something seep through it into his mind, a red-gold acid that seared with the insatiable hunger of fire. The paranoia he'd felt after visiting the spirit's soul room pulsed through him. It all evaporated in a blink, leaving raw holes behind._ _

__"You want something from me." Exhaustion washed cold over him, deadening his efforts at intonation. With a hiss at the exacerbated pain in his chest, Bakura sank to the floor and huddled against the wall. "What is it?"_ _

__The spirit knelt in front of him, smiling. "Only your companionship on my terms."_ _

__His stomach knotted. He should have died―should have been swallowed by shadows, should have been immolated by an angry god, should have bled to death in an alley, should have been sliced apart by the Card Reaper's sickle, should have fallen from the deck to drown, should have been in the car―_ _

__"I might believe that," the spirit said dryly, "had you not passed the last week without even trying to off yourself."_ _

__Bakura didn't argue; it was one thing to say that he would rather die than be enslaved by an evil spirit, but quite another to follow through. During his flash of consciousness atop the blimp, he had not cried out for martyrdom. Perhaps he just hadn't felt responsible enough._ _

__What he wanted didn't matter, anyway. The spirit would never let him die._ _

__"Which you ought to appreciate." The spirit crooked an insubstantial finger through his chin, prompting Bakura's mind to fill the gap in sensation. The touch was probably cold. "You are bound to me in ways you have never imagined. If the gods ever judge your heart, they will condemn it without trial, for fear that my weight would crack their scales." It leaned so near that its nose intersected his. "You hurt without me."_ _

__Without the Ring, but that distinction probably didn't matter as much as Bakura wanted it to. He shivered as the spirit, moving back far enough let his eyes stop crossing, splayed its hand over and through his bloodied shirt. "Now cease this foolishness," it said without rancor. "We have a partnership to maintain."_ _

__Where its fingers touched the Ring, Bakura could almost feel pressure. The five pointers throbbed beneath his skin. "Please don't hurt them."_ _

__"My enmity is for the pharaoh, not his gibbering cheerleaders. I don't even want figurines of them."_ _

__"Then promise you won't hurt them."_ _

__"I promise nothing if they interfere."_ _

__And they would interfere, Bakura knew, because they interfered in everything except what he wished they would. His breaths came shallow and arrhythmic, and he wondered if he could suffocate like that, by breathing but breathing wrong._ _

__With a flicker of vertigo, the sensation passed. His physical awareness dimmed, as if he were experiencing the world through a layer of cling film, and he gave a mental slump of resignation as his body rose without his consent and stalked over to the bathroom mirror._ _

__"Watch," the spirit said through his mouth, and Bakura hated that he couldn't close his eyes or look away from the glass. Nausea twisted through him as the spirit's hard features melted into his own, though he did not regain control of his body. He didn't trust himself to speak._ _

__The spirit mimicked his diffident smile. "I don't need you," it said, with his intonations. "None of your purported friends can tell the difference between your personality and my acting. I could bury your consciousness in oblivion, and the only practical drawbacks would be learning how to operate your appliances and settling for stock game pieces. Now, why do you suppose I don't?"_ _

__Bakura shivered as his sense of touch returned, beginning with the chill of the sink beneath his palms. The spirit appeared at his side, grinning and casting no reflection. He focused on his own image in the mirror to avoid it._ _

__Translucent hair curtained the side of his face as the spirit whispered, "Because I'm the only person in the world who enjoys your company."_ _

__He shivered again and squeezed his eyes shut. "You're not a person."_ _

__"What do you suppose that makes you?" The spirit's ghost-touch registered again through the Ring. When Bakura didn't answer, its voice became almost soft. "If you'd rather be consigned to the dark, say so, and I'll grant your wish. It's going to end the same way with or without you." Softer still: "Your companionship on my terms. Isn't that only fair?"_ _

__He didn't have to answer; he could feel the spirit dipping into his mind like a cat into a fishbowl, scooping up whatever thoughts floated to the surface. Bakura sank forwards until his forehead rested against the mirror. In flashes he recalled the white fangs of the dragon, the glint of thirty coins that hadn't been in his pocket a moment before, the vacant eyes of the figurines._ _

__The spirit had lied, of course. It did need him, or it wouldn't have gone to any trouble on his account. At least this lie was the inverse of the one he usually heard, that he was so wanted and needed that everyone got on perfectly well without him._ _

__With a shudder, Bakura felt the embedded metal slip out of his flesh. Blood trickled down his torso._ _

__"There, now," said the spirit. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"_ _


	5. Thrall

[Saturday]

The spirit left him in control afterwards and even granted him the illusion of privacy when he broke down sobbing and turned on the tap to drown out the noise. He spent most of the rest of the day huddled on the sofa, staring at the carpet. Several times he tried to compose a letter to his sister but couldn't get past the salutation. He supposed he should apologize for his recent lack of correspondence, but he couldn't write "I'm sorry" without rendering everything after hollow.

When he awoke the next morning, he found that the spirit had moved him into his bed and put unbloodied pajamas on him. After a bemused sniff, he discovered that it had also left him a plate with two slices of toast and a glob of baked beans and salad cream.

Exhaustion made him candid: "It unnerves me when you're thoughtful."

The spirit flickered into visibility on the foot of the bed, smiling in a way that was almost not smirking. It had not bothered with matching pajamas, nor with doing up all the buttons. "Eat that before it gets soggy."

"It's meant to be soggy."

The spirit had neglected to supply a knife, so Bakura settled for using the edge of the fork to cut the toast. He watched the spirit out of the corner of his eye while he ate. Enough of its shirt was open to reveal that it had bandaged his chest, and he wondered whether the display was deliberate.

The spirit probed his mind as if it were dipping a finger into unsatisfactory cake batter. "Come now, host, must you always be such a cynic?"

Bakura frowned and lowered the fork from his mouth. "I wish you wouldn't read my thoughts."

"All you had to do was ask." The spirit vanished grin-last, like a Cheshire cat, and spoke inside his head: "We're in no hurry. Finish your breakfast."

Squawking pierced the bedroom window as a pair of Harpie Ladies reignited a territorial dispute. "No hurry," the spirit had said, taking it for granted that the current crisis would end without leaving a mark on the world. Bakura started on the second slice of toast.

To his relief, the spirit continued to let him alone as he showered. He felt coated in a film of lingering malaise, as if he had just spent a week in bed, and he lacked the energy to rush through cleaning himself with his eyes closed. As he rinsed the second round of shampoo from his hair, he watched with detached interest how the foam gathered and swirled over the drain.

The trick, Bakura decided, was to flood himself with the immediate and inconsequential. His hands didn't tremble when he focused on smoothness of the pajama buttons and the loose threads around the buttonholes, on the chill of the linoleum under his bare feet, on the water seeping through the towel as he wrung out his hair. He tried telling himself that he'd chosen this over the dark, so he might as well appreciate it, but that only made him want to crawl back into bed.

In silence, he made tea, reminded himself to buy milk as soon as there were fewer dragons between his flat and the supermarket, and carried his steaming mug with him into his spare room, where he sat at his work table. He focused on the soothing scent and the heat searing his fingertips.

Bakura had expected the spirit to appear opposite him, so it was with a start that he discovered it beside him with its elbows half-through the table. He managed not to fumble his mug.

"I've made lists," the spirit said, and he tried not to wonder what else it had used his body for before he woke up. "My campaign will require far more than figurines." It jabbed a finger towards an open notebook that he had been attempting to use for his classes. Starting on the back of a page of biology notes was a detailed array of locales, with instructions to arrange them into an intricate diorama.

In spite of himself, Bakura felt a tingle of interest as he skimmed entries for "a pharaoh's tomb" and "a haunted village." Most of his Monster World creations followed the pseudo-medieval theme of the base game, if only to blend in with the existing elements. What the spirit called for was more involved than any official expansion.

"This," he began, then paused to rein in both the parts of his mind that were already writing adventure hooks and the parts that were more concerned with how literal the spirit's hooks might be. "I mean, this is _enormous_. I'd need a larger table, of course, but I couldn't begin to afford―"

"Money is no object. You can build this, then?"

He refused to consider where the money would come from. "Yes. But it's going to take some time. And―" he tried to give the spirit an earnest look but worried he came off as plaintive― "I've got to go to school when it reopens. They'll send the truant officer round for me if I miss any more." 

"I'm not unreasonable," the spirit replied, not entirely unconvincingly. "For now, make us a shopping list."

Bakura tore out a blank sheet of paper and jotted down approximations as he read through the spirit's requirements. The trick was to pour himself into practical geometry, which had always come easier to him than algebra. When his thoughts tried to wander, he fixed them on the pressure of the pencil against his thumb.

At the end of the list of locations, the spirit had skipped a few lines and moved on to describing figurines, then props. Bakura turned the page and found that the latter continued almost into his history notes. The level of detail in the entries varied; in one case, the spirit called for "corpses, several piles," whilst in another it covered three pages front and back with individual descriptions of ruined homes. Its was never a consistent madness.

Deciding to sort through the details later, Bakura began sketching broad concepts of the diorama. He had almost forgotten the spirit's presence until its finger sliced a translucent line through the paper. "Not so close together, host," it said. "Can't have the gods' chosen breathing the same air as thieves."

He eyed it, uncertain what to make of its tone. "This setting is historical, isn't it?"

"Did the lack of telephone poles give it away?"

"I meant, you know, _personally_ historical."

It sneered at him. "All history is personal. The victors write it."

"That's not—oh, never mind." Bakura rubbed out the entire Valley of the Kings and put more wasteland between it and the royal palace. "How's that?"

"Acceptable."

He rounded up his table size estimates to leave room for error, then copied the final list to a fresh sheet of paper. On another he began a list of supplies. Wire, foil, plaster, latex, foam, paint, sand... Most of it seemed self-explanatory, though he added "green stuff" parenthetically after "Kneadatite." The local hobby shop had a surprisingly wide selection of epoxy putties.

The spirit read over his shoulder until he set his pencil down, whereupon it seized control of his body. Before he could protest, it summoned Dark Ruler Ha Des from a stack of cards on the work table. Ha Des was too large to fit comfortably in the room; his massive curved horns, which were absent in the artwork, scraped the ceiling even when he stooped.

"Fetch these," the spirit told him, handing over Bakura's list. "Scratch the table and I'll have you on the Nightmare Wheel."

"Pay cash at the hobby shop if you can manage," Bakura said, in case he could be heard from his soul room. "They're a small local business." From the monster's expression, he gleaned that he had been both audible and overly optimistic. "Please don't hurt anyone."

The spirit made a small exasperated noise with his mouth but added, "Don't waste time going after anything that isn't bloody stupid enough to go after you first. Go on, get to it."

Ha Des shuffled out the door, turning sideways to squeeze his massive shoulders through. Bakura tried not to wonder what his downstairs neighbors would make of the heavy footfalls, nor whether his security deposit covered damage to the ceiling. "Thank you," he said uncertainly. 

The spirit grunted and brought three more cards to life in a series of flicks and flashes. Dark Necrofear, the Earl of Demise, and the Headless Knight paraded into the living room as Bakura watched with growing bafflement. "What's all this about?"

"Your new table won't fit in here," the spirit replied. "Rearrange the living room."

Bakura found himself shoved back out into his body to face a row of expectant monsters. "Just a moment, please," he said, before rummaging for his tape measure.

After several false starts, they wedged the sofa and coffee table into the spare room, crammed the bookshelves into his bedroom, and shifted the television stand halfway into the kitchen. "Thank you," Bakura told his crew. "We may have to adjust a bit later." When he moved to dismiss them, the spirit stayed his hand.

"That green stuff's cured by now," it said. "Isn't it time you painted those figurines?"

Most of the monsters kept to themselves as he worked, but Dark Necrofear followed him into his spare room and stationed herself beside him, one arm cradling her baby and the other extended daintily to hold a selection of brushes. When he took a break, she ran her jointed fingers through his hair. The spirit made vague contemptuous noises but didn't order her to stop.

He was having his third go at a face for the figurine most swathed in fabric (the first the spirit deemed not gormless enough, and the second, with crossed eyes, a step too gormless) when a terrible thudding came from the other side of the door. Bakura hurried to the spyhole to confirm that Ha Des had returned, arms festooned with plastic bags. He tried not to think about his neighbors.

Opening the door revealed that Ha Des had dragged home a table so large that Bakura wondered how it had fit in the lift. "Thank you, that's quite, er, something. We'll have to take the legs off to get it inside."

The spirit seized control. "No," it said sharply as Ha Des moved to obey. "It's not going through the doorway." Before Bakura could ask what it meant, the Ring put on an impressive light show that ended with the table inside his flat, intact and in the way. The monsters squeezed around it to lift it.

The table fit in the living room, but only just. One of the corners gouged the paint from the wall, and Bakura would have to drag his chair under the table to sit at any side but the one facing the spare room. At least the wide frame around the sunken portion of table provided a platform for his supplies. 

Once he had settled in, the spirit dismissed the monsters it had summoned, vanished itself, and said, "Have at it."

Bakura broke the project down into smaller and smaller pieces, penciling guidelines on the table's surface. Once everything felt slightly less overwhelming, he crawled under the table to the video, into which he inserted _The Thing_. When the flamethrower appeared on screen, the spirit manifested on the edge of the table to watch.

The trick, he told himself, was perspective. "Why" didn't matter; nothing he did now mattered. In the long term, whatever the spirit intended, it tended to fail. In the short term, there was no world beyond his flat, no future beyond the diorama's completion, and no answer to the question of what any of this made him.

* * *

[No longer Saturday]

It got easier, and easier not to hate that it did. There was even an odd comfort to the routine: wake, confirm that the world was still full of monsters, shower, slide a plate of food along the frame of the table, put on a horror film, and work. Time slipped past, sometimes in fitful jumps that might have been the fault of Bakura's concentration or of the spirit borrowing his body. Sometimes he thought he heard the phone ring in the instant before the day lurched ahead, but no good ever came of asking about it. It was enough, he decided, that he never found blood on his sleeves.

When he made his first pass at the village that the spirit's instructions lavished with more detail than any other location, Bakura paused the current zombie splatter film to ask, "How do you end up with an entire village of thieves, anyway?"

"You set some unlucky sods to building tombs until they work out it's a cleverer idea to rob them." The spirit snapped its fingers. "Unpause it, host, or I will. I want to watch this bloke finish getting eaten."

Bakura kept his thumb away from the button. "By 'tombs,' you mean the ones in the Valley of the Kings, right?"

The spirit turned slowly from its approximated perch on the table, annoyance etched into its features. "Did I call for any others?"

"It's just that they weren't building tombs there five thousand years ago."

The spirit sneered at him. "Of course they were, you idiot. I was there."

"Then you must have got your dates wrong." With a confidence that his second-hand grasp on Egyptology did not entirely warrant, he continued, "This is all very New Kingdom. Three thousand years ago, more like."

Frowning, the spirit flicked its fingers up and down. It vanished and took control of Bakura's body just long enough to scribble a calculation, then offered a colorful appraisal of the answer's sexual history.

"Told you," he said.

"This is your fault. You've infected me with your inability to understand mathematics."

"I can at least _count_." Bakura turned to a dog-eared page of the notebook and skimmed down to a line encircled by question marks. "And what about the four-poster bed?"

"Bugger if I know. That memory isn't one of mine." Before he could decide whether it would be worthwhile to ask what the spirit was doing with anyone else's memories, it added, "You live in a piece of jewelry for a few millennia and see how well you can count afterwards."

So far it had been unexpectedly forthcoming, and the list of props included seven tiny Millennium Items. Bakura curled a hand over the Ring and ventured, "How did you end up in here, anyway?"

The spirit flashed its teeth. "Imagine how I could make you regret your curiosity."

He let go and reanimated the zombies.

* * *

[Something like a Wednesday]

The gurgling of the ravenous undead was echoed by Bakura's stomach. After securing the fiddly bit of cliff he'd been shaping, he took the half-eaten Pop-Tart out of his mouth and asked, "When did we last have a vegetable?"

The spirit hummed. "Do crisps count?"

Through the window came the racket of brawling Magnet Warriors. Bakura sighed, steeled himself, and said, "There's a supermarket not too far from here."

"You know where the cards are."

"I wouldn't trust any of them picking out veg." Bakura's imagination offered up Puppet Master's strings dragging rotten heads of lettuce up the stairs as an even more unfortunate reprise of the time Puppet Master was tasked with doing a wash. "I just need to nip out with an escort."

The spirit faced him, eyebrows arched. "Are you asking me for a favor?"

Bakura found himself on the defensive: "Listen, don't act as if you haven't got any vested interest in not letting me die of malnutrition! I'm probably already halfway to scurvy or beriberi or something." He waved the uneaten half of the Pop-Tart. "This isn't even fruit-flavored. I can't even _pretend_ it's healthy."

"Host," the spirit said sharply, "shut up."

The world toppled away.

* * *

Consciousness returned with a whiff of aging vegetation. There was a weight in Bakura's right hand, which he determined, after a puzzled glance, to be a head of cabbage. To his left, a Beaver Warrior gnawed on a wooden produce stand. No humans appeared to be present, not even to mind the shop, though looters had clearly had their way with it at some point prior.

"You take care of this," said the spirit. 

Bakura wished it would manifest so that he could direct his frown at something other than the cabbage. "You didn't have to knock me out!"

"Of course I did. You were rabbiting on about beriberi."

Muttering and keeping well clear of the Beaver Warrior, he trudged to the front of the supermarket for a trolley. Efforts had been made to board up the doors and windows, though the spirit had either undone them or taken advantage of the work of other miscreants. Those had been more monsters than humans, Bakura reckoned; only a few of the tills had been smashed open.

None of the fresh vegetables looked particularly appetizing. The frozen ones seemed in better shape, with no evidence of catastrophic thawing and refreezing. After minimal internal debate, he filled half the trolley with sacks of frozen veg, then set about replenishing the contents of his fridge. He summoned Dark Necrofear to rout a waddle of Nightmare Penguins from the luncheon meats. 

The spirit pushed impressions of raw beef into his mind until he found some mince that didn't look likely to kill him. "We're going to cook this," he said aloud, ignoring the spirit's dismissive chuckle. As consolation, he added two jars of marshmallow fluff to the trolley.

With minimal guilt, knowing that most of what he took would have gone to waste, Bakura followed his monster and his overstuffed trolley to the exit. She had assumed pushing duties while he was checking expiry dates on milk and eggs; now her legless doll sat awkwardly in the child seat, its arm dangling over the side, with a shriveled radish jammed into its mouth. Bakura did not feel qualified to judge her parenting.

The streets were eerily deserted under an overcast sky made darker by swarming monsters. A few cars raced past with little regard for traffic lights. Bakura wondered what the neighbors made of him, if any were peering out their windows. At the very least, he wanted to point out that he intended to return the trolley.

"And here you were so keen on playing outside," the spirit said, after a distant roar made him tense.

A half-formed comment about how nice it had been to get some fresh air and exercise died as Dark Necrofear blasted a Monstrous Bird that Bakura hadn't even noticed swooping towards him. He pressed closer to her, to the point that he had to focus on not tripping over her boots. To calm himself, he got into a package of biscuits.

"Beri-bloody-beri," the spirit muttered.

* * *

[A blur like a Tuesday]

There was plenty of detailing and interior work to be done, but not until Bakura had enough critical distance to be certain there were no more structural changes to make. Sliding most of his tools away along the frame, he made space for customizing figurines.

A rumbling from his stomach overlapped a burst of hideous squawking from just outside the window. After summoning Dark Necrofear to clear off the Harpie Ladies again, he made a plate of dippy eggs and Marmite soldiers, with which he settled in to read over the spirit's notes.

On at least one point, the spirit hadn't lied; none of its descriptions even roughly matched Téa, Joey, or Tristan. The description of the pharaoh consisted only of an outfit and "I shouldn't have to spell this out for you," which came as no surprise. The surprise came a page later, when the description for a "King of Thieves" began, "Look in the mirror and pretend you've cut your hair and started winning knife fights."

_Create the components I require, and I'll run you through it_ , the spirit had said, sinister in retrospect. Bakura paused an encore viewing of _The Thing_ to ask, "Why does he look like me?"

The spirit neither asked for clarification nor looked away from the screen. "Did you miss the caveats?"

"Fine, why does he look like me with caveats?" Not receiving an answer, Bakura tapped the notebook emphatically and added, "I don't even understand what's meant by them. What does winning knife fights look like?"

"Did you miss the bit about the scar?"

"You're being terrifically unhelpful, you realize."

The spirit finally deigned to turn, glowering. "It was meant to be a useful starting point. Don't get in a sweat about it." It continued to glower until Bakura resumed the video.

He dropped his gaze back to the description, which further specified that he should render his reflection's visage less gormless and its physique more impressive. The wording tripped his lip between his teeth. "Wait, is this _you?_ "

The spirit's shoulders visibly tensed. "I'll be controlling more than one piece in this game."

"That isn't what I asked."

"It's what I answered. You're getting on my tits, host."

Chewing his lip, Bakura picked out a generic rogue figurine as a base and stared unproductively at it. A cold touch on his nape made him jump. When he twisted in his seat, he discovered that Dark Necrofear had begun to plait his hair. 

"Oh," he said, relaxing. "That's all right, then." As he sketched aimlessly, soothed by her touch, she secured dozens of little plaits together on the back of his head. When he reached back to feel them, he lost control of his arm.

Under the spirit's command, his finger scraped the Marmite from a strip of toast and smeared a stripe vertically over his right eye, then swiped twice horizontally beneath. Bakura protested but found himself prevented from wiping his face. 

After a warning growl, the spirit manifested again, sticky-scarred, with most of its hair pinned up. "Well?" it snapped when he stared at it. "I'm not going to model for you all day."

He had no idea whether to thank it, so he sucked his finger clean and sketched in silence.

* * *

[The hang of a Thursday]

Once he had most of the human figurines near completion—the pharaoh was scarcely half-finished and difficult in every possible sense—Bakura investigated those with decidedly more involved descriptions. Ancient Egypt, at least as filtered through the spirit, had been teeming with giant monsters. That most of their descriptions referred to popular Duel Monsters cards only made this stranger.

On the other hand, it also made his work simpler. After confirming that the modern world was also still teeming with giant monsters, he sent Ha Des shopping for Dungeon Dice Monsters miniatures. That left only a few pieces requiring extensive work.

With _The Evil Dead_ playing on the video, Bakura set about learning what a Diabound was meant to be. Within a paragraph he had a headache.

"Are you certain about this one?" he asked, tapping his pencil against the paper. "The Duel Monsters ones are all right, but this half-snake thing seems a bit, ah..."

The spirit's eyes narrowed in a sidelong glare. "Spit it out."

"A bit, you know, _phallic_." When his blushing did not bring about the heat-death of the universe, Bakura was emboldened enough to add, "And why has it got little wings on its―"

"Your place is to work, not to question," the spirit snapped.

With a long sigh, Bakura returned to his reading. This was history, after all, though he suspected that asking the spirit about history was like asking David Icke about politics. He wouldn't have been surprised if the spirit demanded additional dioramas of Atlantis and Skaro.

On the next page he read one entry three times, rubbed his knuckles into his temples, and groaned. "Why can't you just buy a motorbike like a normal person?"

"What?" Looseleaf thoughts rustled as the spirit sussed out his meaning. "I don't think I like what you're insinuating."

"I asked you not to read my mind. And I'm only pointing out that your avatars might stand to be a bit more subtle."

"'Subtle'?" The spirit vanished with a flash of teeth, and Bakura's stomach twisted as he was yanked into the darkness between their soul rooms. He flinched when the spirit seized him by the shirt collar. "Need I remind you that this is _your_ pathetic flesh, so perceived shortcomings are entirely your―"

In a bid to keep the conversation from careering any farther down that road, Bakura blurted, "But we've already got a figurine for Zorc! Why can't we use that one instead of the thing with the inappropriate dragon?"

The spirit tightened its grip. "It isn't inappropriate if it's meant to be there. How would you like it if I marched this body into the kitchen and castrated it with a paring knife?"

"You won't," he replied, wishing his legs hadn't already twitched defensively.

After a tense moment the spirit broke into a cackle, and Bakura took a disorienting tumble back into the physical world. He shook his fringe out of his eyes.

"Rewind," said the spirit, reappearing on the table frame.

As Bakura complied, he said, "Perhaps the dragon could come out of the chest instead."

"That's ridiculous."

"How is it not already ridiculous?" A moment later, his thoughts caught up with him. "Wait a tick, is _that_ what you look like?"

"I told you I'll be controlling more than one game piece." The spirit was briefly engrossed by an on-screen dismemberment, then turned its glare back on Bakura. "Piss off!"

Startled, he dropped his pencil. "Sorry?"

"Focus on your work and stop trying to suss me out!"

The sensation of having his thoughts rummaged through did nothing to help keep them in order. " _You_ piss off! How am I meant to focus with you—"

The world flickered, and Bakura found himself face-down against the table with no idea how much time had passed beyond that the film was over. He shook his head to try to clear away his disorientation. Chastising the spirit seemed unlikely to result in anything like an apology.

Even if he hadn't spent days spent hunched over the same workspace, he would have noticed that his materials had been disturbed. An uncoiled blue and yellow ribbon of putty directed his attention to the miniature Thief King. He picked up the half-finished figurine, frowned, and tilted it to peer beneath the shenti.

"Really now, how would he even _walk_?"

* * *

[Sunday, perhaps]

For the first time in more days than Bakura had kept track of, the spirit initiated a conversation. Its "well, well" took him sufficiently off-guard that he spent a moment wondering why the television sounded much closer than usual.

When he looked up from shaping a tiny jar to find the spirit watching him, lips curled expectantly, he blinked a few times before asking, "Well, er, what?"

"The pharaoh's gone and lost his vessel's soul. How careless of him."

Bakura's putty knife hit the table. "Good God, is Yugi―wait, how would you know?"

"I've got a man on the inside." The spirit vanished with an unnerving giggle, slipping into control of his body. Bakura watched his own hands stop trembling. "Your heart's beating faster than a rabbit's, host," it said with his mouth, pressing two fingers to his throat. "Do you fear that I would ever be so remiss with you?"

With a shiver, Bakura felt the spirit release him. He clasped his hands together and tried to breathe evenly. 

When he felt in control of himself again, he asked, "Is Yugi going to be all right?"

"Not in the long term, obviously."

He flinched. "Don't, please. I understand that you hate the pharaoh, but Yugi's Yugi, and it's cruel to say things like that. And it's not as if..." He trailed off, finding himself sickly and irreversibly aware of an edge that he had been trying to pretend he wasn't walking along. "That is, you can just take the Puzzle, can't you? You don't have to—"

The spirit cut him off with a humorless bark of laughter, manifesting in the middle of the table. "You haven't got the faintest idea what you've asking."

"I'm asking you not to hurt him! They've beat you enough times without hurting me." It occurred to Bakura that this was not strictly accurate, nor perhaps something to remind the spirit of.

"And here we are, part and parcel." The spirit snorted. "Drop it, host. You don't owe the pharaoh's vessel an intercession."

"At least try! _Please_. Just promise me that much and I'll—"

"I grow weary of this." A growl beveled the spirit's voice. "Before you persist in this pathetic bargaining, consider whether you even have anything to offer me that I could not simply take."

A desperately unwanted thought threw off the shackles of discretion to go streaking through Bakura's mind. "Don't you dare," he blurted, in the split-second before he felt the spirit intercept the idea and drag it out for inspection. He understood now why small animals froze in the glare of headlamps.

"Oh, yes," the spirit said dryly, "I can't begin to tell you how much I'd enjoy an awkward metaphysical tumble with my cold fish of a host. I'm sure the best part would be listening to you think about what a brave little martyr you are." It sneered. "Leaving aside 'could not simply take,' where the hell did you get―never mind, I see your lines of thought, and I don't care to untangle them."

The unpleasant tugging in Bakura's brain ended abruptly. He stared for what felt like a very long time before managing, "What?"

"Bit slow today, are we? I'm telling you to keep your trousers on."

"What?"

"Dammit, host, you heard me."

"What?" almost made it out again before Bakura's tongue rolled up to catch it. Instead he stammered his way through "But―if you―then why are you always―you're always going on about―" He hit upon something solid: "You stole my gym teacher's soul because he told me to cut my hair!"

The spirit quirked an eyebrow. "So do you think everyone who likes your hair wants to ravish you?"

"You're doing it again! Stop making out like I'm the irrational one when you're mad as a box of frogs!"

"What?"

"You heard me!"

He darted into the spare room and threw himself prone on the sofa, which did exactly as much good as he should have expected. "You're making a solid case for your rationality," the spirit said.

"Sod off! And stay out of my thoughts!"

"Then stop having them about me. Nobody likes a tease." It pounced on Bakura's reaction, then broke into cackles. "You did it again!"

Scowling, he waved his hands over his head. The spirit laughed harder. 

"I hate you," he muttered into the cushion.

"How fickle. A few seconds ago I was co-starring in your own personal Mills & Boon."

The pillow he threw at it collided with a lamp, and the shattering of the light bulb against the floor followed a heartbeat after. The spirit made an irked noise. 

Abruptly Bakura found the sofa cushions replaced by the carpet of his soul room, and his vague awareness of the spirit's manifestation by its form looming over him. That it was holding a knife at least provided a different angle for his anxiety.

"Untwist your knickers," it said, and nudged his ribs with its foot until he reluctantly sat up. "You bollocksed that up so entertainingly, I find myself in a magnanimous mood."

Without waiting for a response, it stooped to carve into the wall two intersecting pairs of parallel lines, forming a hash symbol. Bakura was half-surprised it didn't hurt, somehow, considering. With a shudder, he watched the oppressive violet fog of a Shadow Game seep into the cuts.

The spirit passed him the knife and said, "The rules are simple. Noughts and Crosses. For every game you win, I'll spare one of your meddlesome classmates. For every game I win, I'll go out of my way to kill one. If a game ends in a draw, we'll move on to the next. Win three in a row and I'll give you the vessel. Have at."

The knife fell from Bakura's fingers to clatter against a pile of dice. "That's horrible!"

"No risk, no reward, host. Be grateful that I'm leaving it up to you whether you play."

Legs trembling, he got to his feet and headed back out towards his body. He resisted the urge to kick the knife away, on the grounds that he'd probably botch the gesture.

"The offer stands," the spirit called after him.

Yugi would be fine, he tried to tell himself, regardless of anything he did. Yugi always won without him.

* * *

[Demonstrably Tuesday]

Bakura's awareness made a disorienting jump from detailing the pharaoh's throne to peering out through his soul room wall at the street leading to his building. The sun was out for the first time in days, or perhaps longer. From the strange silence, he assumed that the local Duel Monsters had either settled their many territorial disputes or collectively migrated, or that the spirit had gone on an impressively thorough rampage.

With some trepidation, he asked, "What are we doing outside?"

"Taking a walk," the spirit replied, and passed over control of his body.

Nothing about that sounded convincing, but there was no blood on his sleeves, and the nearest thing to contraband in his pockets was a jar of marshmallow fluff. Bakura was still taking stock of himself when the spirit added, "No doubt the streets will be teeming again once word gets out that the apocalypse fizzled."

His heart fluttered up his throat. "Yugi's all right, then?"

"He's back to winning card games and shouting about friendship, which turned out to be yet another mastermind's fatal weakness." The spirit sniffed derisively.

No more monsters, then, but the ones Bakura made himself. He fingered the deck in his pocket because it was something small and solid, unlike the future bursting open around him, blasting sheer cliffs on either side of his feet. Waves of dizziness slowed his pace.

In an effort to calm himself, he asked, "Did you really walk us down to the shops for marshmallow fluff?"

"It's _your_ sodding sweet tooth."

They had recently depleted the jar they'd taken to keeping on the table frame. Some combination of logistical difficulties and Bakura's insistence had persuaded the spirit to consume the contents with a butter knife rather than with Bakura's fingers, but no amount of wheedling and gastrointestinal rumbling could stop the spirit trying the stuff as a condiment on whatever he was attempting to eat. Adding a layer of marshmallow to a jam sandwich was one thing, but then had come the vile application of strawberry-flavored fluff to every element of a fry-up.

"Maybe it'll last longer now that we're out of beef jerky," Bakura said. To his dismay, the spirit took control just long enough to steer him into a corner shop. "Really? Must we?"

"This body don't get enough protein, host. I thought you were fussed about that sort of thing."

When he tried to pay the grizzled, armed shop attendant, Bakura discovered that the spirit hadn't bothered to bring his wallet. He was in the process of stammering apologies and replacing his would-be purchases when he found himself in the street again, nearly home, with jerky poking out of his pockets.

His pulse raced. "What did you do?"

"Sorted it." 

If he pressed for details, he might get them. There was no blood on his hands; he tried to believe that he was guilty of no worse than theft.

The spirit's grin pulled at his brain.

* * *

He arrived home to the initially welcome distraction of a message on his answerphone. From it he learned that Marik shared a telephone line with his siblings, that Marik had not enjoyed explaining the presence of an obscene answerphone message that filled up half the tape, and that if this ever happened again, Marik would be more than happy to inform the pharaoh that certain parasitic spirits were running amok and practically begging for another trip to the Shadow Realm. Bakura took all of this in stride until the diatribe ended with a list of times during which Marik could be relied upon to answer the phone himself.

When he reached for the button to delete the message, the spirit stayed his hand. He grimaced. "You're disgusting."

"Don't be prim, host. One of us has to keep the pipes clean."

"I didn't hear that," Bakura decided. He shoved the fluff and jerky roughly into the cupboard and turned on the television.

For the first time in what felt like months, he watched the news. Order was confirmed to have been restored to the world, which was free of rogue monsters and eager to return to the regular rhythms of life. Domino High announced the intention to resume classes in two days. The future yawned with teeth.

"I suppose I should do my homework," Bakura said without conviction, sitting down at the table. The paint was dry now on the crumbling buildings that would form the surface portion of the thieves' ruined village. Next came using the spirit's surprisingly intricate diagram to arrange the walls like scattered bones. He was getting better now at suppressing the desire to ask the spirit why it cared so specifically.

The spirit's form appeared in his peripheral vision as it leaned over his shoulder. "Make the Earl of Demise do it. He's classically educated."

"I'll give that idea the full consideration it's due." Bakura daubed glue on one of the larger chunks and took his time lining it up with the marks he'd penciled. The spirit hovered intently.

He hesitated, muscles tight. It took him a moment to recognize the urge to break something just to prove it was fragile. 

There was never blood on his hands because it all ended up inside him, screaming in his ears. He wanted to shatter something and feel the echo in his own bones. He wanted to hurl the diorama piece by piece through the windowpane, then cut himself to ribbons leaping after it. He wanted to walk into a fire hot enough to burn the Ring to ash.

Or he only wanted to want, and only so long as he knew he wouldn't be satisfied. It was better not to want anything at all.

"Get your finger out," the spirit said. "The glue's going dry."

His hands were shaking. "Would you rather do this yourself?" he asked sharply.

The spirit twined his nerves like a wire, a flicker away from shorting him out. "No."

After a few deep breaths, Bakura wiped the glue from the piece and set it aside, then went to make himself a cup of tea.

* * *

[Might as well be a Monday]

He awoke slumped over the table with his head pillowed on his arms and his sleeve damp with drool. Probability suggested that it was a school day. As he got groggily to his feet, Bakura noticed that his hair had been plaited and secured with a piece of string.

Dark Necrofear's cool touch on his scalp was the last sensation he could recall clearly from the night before; everything else had spiraled into the intricate madness of detailing tiny Millennium Items through a magnifying glass. There was a neat stack of paper on the table frame, which proved to be the history essay that the Earl of Demise had been assigned to write for him. Even a cursory skim was enough to confirm that it wasn't going to go over any better than the literature essay had. Apparently the most important lesson from the French Revolution was that the guillotine took all the artistry out of decapitation.

"If I'm sent to the school counselor again," he told the empty room, "I'll have less time to work."

The spirit didn't respond, and Bakura wondered if it was sleeping, if it even could sleep. He checked the clock on the video and discovered that he ought to have left for school ten minutes ago.

After a long sigh, he smoothed his rumpled clothes, buttoned his jacket, gathered his schoolbooks, and resolved to duck into the loo between classes to clean his teeth.

* * *

When he arrived at school, he discovered his classroom empty of students but full of bags and books. A note on the chalkboard informed him that he was missing an assembly. Relieved, Bakura slid into his seat and attempted to salvage his history essay. His head throbbed with exhaustion; painting correction fluid over the most explicit passages proved all he could manage.

Did he have an exam? The word "quadratic" figured ever more prominently and urgently into his maths homework, but he couldn't remember the significance beyond that the problems had too many solutions. It didn't seem right that _x_ lived two lives at once and never collapsed.

An analgesic fog crept over him, offering to blot out headache and consciousness alike. _Go away_ , Bakura thought at it.

To his surprise, the spirit chuckled softly and let him alone. The low thunder of feet and voices rolled down the hallway, then burst into a higher decibel range as the classroom door flew open.

"C'mon, Téa," said a voice loud enough to rise above the rest, "just lemme copy a little! It's no fair givin' us a test our first day back!"

They had finally returned. Bakura considered waving, then bit his lip and pretended to be absorbed in his maths notes, most of which were actually notes for the diorama. Algebra was irrelevant, anyway. From the right vantage point, nothing mattered at all.

"Hey, Bakura!" 

Either Yugi moved with surprising stealth for someone so noticeable, or Bakura had begun micro-sleeping. Or else the spirit was taking control in nibbles. It didn't bear thinking about, he decided, and he returned the greeting as brightly as he could manage.

Yugi perched backwards on the desk in front of him and frowned. "Are you okay? You look like you haven't slept."

"I'm fine." This lie had always come easily. Bakura smiled as he asked, "How have you been? You've been gone for rather a long while."

In the background, Téa and Joey continued to debate academic ethics as Tristan cheered them both on indiscriminately. "It's been totally crazy," Yugi replied. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you!"

"I might."

Yugi hesitated, then laughed and scratched the back of his head. "Yeah, I guess you would. Oh, man where do I even start?" He dropped his voice to an excited whisper. "We went to California and saved the world from this ten-thousand-year-old evil dragon from Atlantis. Seriously! I even lost my soul―" a reassuring look flickered over his face, directed more inwards than at Bakura— "but everything's okay now. We're all back."

Bakura's heart wobbled towards his feet. "That's good to hear."

"Then we had to play in a tournament for plane tickets home," Yugi continued, "but that was pretty fun. Anyway, what've you been up to?"

"We" never included Bakura. "Nothing much," he replied, trying not to think about why the spirit wasn't bothering to dictate his responses. "I don't lead a terribly exciting life."

"Where'd you learn how to do that Tarzan swing, then?"

"Come again?"

"You know, when you beat up Bandit Keith." Yugi brought one hard arcing down into the other, which flailed its fingers as it flopped backward on the desk. Bakura stared blankly at it. "Thanks again for that, by the way! If he'd stolen even one piece of the Puzzle, I... man, I don't even wanna think about it."

The bell rang. As Yugi hurried back to his desk, hands cupped protectively over the Puzzle, Bakura expended the last of his energy to keep down an emotional response. He fought the urge to pass out on his desk.

The spirit's phantom grin cut into his thoughts. "Don't say I never did you any favors," it said, curling over him like the darkness that ringed his vision, and he had no resistance left to offer it.

* * *

Consciousness returned amid the mingled scents of putty and paint, bringing with it a crick in his neck and an unpleasant taste in his mouth. The edge of the table frame poked into his ribs. Bakura's body still ached for sleep, but his mind no longer insisted that he stare at the wall and perhaps have a good cry. He rubbed his eyes and yawned.

"Your education is excruciating," said the voice inside his skull. 

Bakura suspected that his notes from the day, if he had any, would consist of upsetting doodles and random invective. "Ah, thank you?" he hazarded, then added, "Did anything happen that I ought to know about?"

"You kipped through gym class today, and you'll kip through it for the rest of the week so long as you let that near-sighted moron go on thinking you're a girl."

His social acceptability had lingered on life support for so long that he couldn't work up any particular sorrow at its passing. Instead he took a deep breath and said, "Please don't hurt Yugi."

"The pharaoh's vessel doesn't deserve your concern. And you haven't even had a go yet at Noughts and Crosses."

" _Please_."

The spirit made a noise that was more growl than sigh. "As much as I enjoy irony, this particular bit is wearing thin."

Biting his lip, Bakura cast about for an argument but came up short when his eyes fell on a foam tray sitting on the edge of the table frame. Disgust screwed up his nose. "Did you put marshmallow fluff on raw mince?"

"What of it?"

He peered at the smeared remains, trying to discern whether the fluff had been strawberry or just stained by juices. When he realized how pointless this was, Bakura broke into giggles and let himself fall forward onto the table, where he came eye-to-shenti with the figurine of the Thief King. His laughter redoubled. Unable to catch his breath, he thought, _Sometimes I just can't take you seriously._

His body made a miffed noise as he was shunted into spectatorship. The spirit maneuvered him into his bedroom, where it stuck him, still fully clothed, under the blankets. Control of his body returned as a firm command to sleep rang in his mind.

"What, with my trousers still on?"

The spirit dragged him deep into unconsciousness, safely below the reach of dreams.

* * *

[Late]

Bakura woke unexpectedly in his living room, seated at his work table. It was dark outside the windows and sounded stormy; when he looked at the clock on the video, he was alarmed to discover that it was late in the evening. "I've slept through school?"

From inside his head, the spirit gave the impression of a shrug. "It doesn't matter."

What his body had been doing without him for at least twenty-four hours probably did matter, even if he didn't want it to, but Bakura couldn't see any good in pursuing the issue. Instead he took stock of himself: no bloodstains, curiously damp, fully clothed—

"Why am I wearing a leather duster?"

"It's pissing it down," the spirit replied, reasonably.

His hair dripped cold down the back of his neck. Bakura shivered. "What do you want?"

"Just to make certain everything's in place. I've made you tea and a checklist."

So it had, Bakura discovered when he turned to his left. Steam curled over the mug, and a taste confirmed the proper ratios of milk and sugar. Out of habit he looked for a monster to thank, but his flat appeared empty.

With an unease that the tea couldn't soothe, he worked his way through the spirit's list, lifting roofs to check inside buildings. When he took it all in at once, he really had created something tremendous; his little world felt almost alive, like Frankenstein's monster awaiting a jolt of lightning. It seemed, sometimes, as if he had never done anything worthwhile before he began detailing the haunted husk of Kul Elna. His figurines looked cartoonishly crude by comparison.

His hand trembled as he ticked off the final entry, a trio of hourglasses too large to be part of the game world. "It's all there," he said, voice low with exhaustion. "Can I go to bed now?"

"Finish your tea."

His stomach felt too tight to take anything else in. There was nothing else left to focus on; there was no safe perspective left to take. "What is," Bakura began, and had to stop. Taking a deep breath, he wrapped both hands around the mug. "What is all of this really for?"

"My revenge against the pharaoh."

"No, it isn't." He tightened his grip and soldiered on: "If that's all you wanted, you wouldn't have given Yugi back the Puzzle."

The spirit appeared in front of him, bisected at the waist by the table, and regarded him with an unreadable stare. 

Bakura stared back. "You could have stolen a piece of it and melted it down, and that would have been the end of it. And it's not as if you haven't had chances to just, I don't know, stab him or something. You've never had any trouble stabbing anybody else. And you've already―I've already―I just want to know. Please."

"One last wish you'd ask of me?" The spirit gave him an indulgent smile, which slowly sharpened with mania. "This _is_ revenge, but no petty mortal grudge. When I succeed, the pharaoh will be devoured by eternal darkness. So will everything else."

The sentence hung improbably in the air.

"What, everything?"

"Yes, host. _Everything_."

Bakura continued to stare until his dry eyes forced him to blink. "I never thought you were serious about that," he said at last, eliciting a matching blink from his double. "You can't be serious."

The spirit's eyes narrowed as it leaned forward, drawing its lips from its teeth in what might have been a grin or a snarl. "Can't I be?" it said in a voice so guttural that it scarcely resembled Bakura's. "You understand well enough what I am. Not a person, indeed." For a flash, it had more teeth than should have fit into Bakura's mouth. "Know, then, that I will not be satisfied until I have brought it all to ruin―everything that crawls and creeps and swims and flies, everything that eats and is eaten, everything that craves light and withers in the dark. I will destroy all things, and I will revel in the snuffing of every spark. My advent is the extinction of hope. Nothing will remain but my world of shadows, my dead-alive kingdom, my nightmare-without-waking."

"You're serious." Bakura's voice came out thick and dull despite the hammering of his heart. With a shudder, he lowered his head and stared at his fingers, which had gone white at the tips. He tried to sound reasonable: "But if you destroy _everything_ , there won't be―there won't be any more telly. Or―or marshmallow fluff. Or―"

The spirit's snort silenced him. "Daft little creature. If you were wasting away in a dungeon, would you turn down a chance for freedom because you'd grown fond of the rats?"

Bakura had to close his eyes to continue breathing evenly. "I'm one of the rats, then?"

"More of a rat-bone shiv." It cackled, then snapped its spectral fingers next to his ear. "Look at me." When he obeyed, seeing no point in doing otherwise, the spirit's face loomed just in front of his own. "There's nothing left for you in this world."

Not nothing, but the world had grown so small lately that all he could call to mind were empty figurines and a drawer filled with letters that would never be read. He was too tired to think, too tired to argue, too tired even to worry. His voice trickled out of him: "I wish you wouldn't."

"Shh." The sound came from his own mouth, which curled with the spirit's smirk. Bakura watched, listless and unresisting, as his hand ghosted with alien grace over the rooftops. Muted textures filtered through.

Yugi would win, he told himself, because Yugi always won, just as surely as Bakura always lost. He could look forward to waking up scarred and hollow in new places, or perhaps to finally getting killed in a way that stuck. 

"Not this time," the spirit lilted. "This plan is all sewn up. We're not playing Duel Monsters; we're playing War, and I've stacked both the decks. I _am_ the rules."

Violet-tinged darkness curled up over the legs and sides of the table. With a snap of his fingers, the spirit banished the shadows to reveal that the living room had been gutted. Only a few patches of sand and dried glue on the floor offered evidence that Bakura had done anything at all.

The spirit's voice purred in his head: "You've served me so well, host." Without any change in tone, it added, "You're no longer necessary."

The next thing Bakura was aware of was a stone stairway rushing up to meet his face, and he had only a moment to berate himself for being surprised.


	6. Gone Forth by Day

[Barely Saturday]

At ten past two, Bakura was awakened by an explosion in his kitchen.

Adrenaline jolted him upright in bed, from which position he glared at his alarm clock until deciding that he ought to make sure he wasn't being burgled again. He pulled his dressing gown on over his pajamas, retrieved the wooden bat from beneath his bed, and made as much noise as possible as he opened the bedroom door. 

Darkness covered the open area that formed his kitchen and living room. Bakura's flat was never quite silent―his upstairs neighbors came and went continuously, as if they were sharks and would die of holding still―but the small noises he heard at present came unmistakably from not far in front of him. Something like glass tinkled against the linoleum floor.

Rats, probably. The last ones had knocked over his sugar bowl, gorged themselves on the contents, and left sticky pawprints all over the worktop. He reached out to flick the light switch.

The incandescent glare briefly forced his eyes shut and drew a sharp rebuke from his kitchen floor. Bakura's eyelids flew open on a scene that his brain refused to process: shattered green enamel and black plastic everywhere, much of it red-slicked, blood in smears and rivulets and handprints all over the linoleum and half the cupboards―had that been his _kettle?_ ―and at the center of it all, crouched like an animal, naked and intricately lacerated, hair glittering with shrapnel, left wrist dangling crookedly―

The bat landed on Bakura's foot. "Bloody hell," he said weakly, waiting to wake up. The throbbing pain in his toes put an end to that hope.

Once, the thing in the kitchen could have been his reflection, albeit with unrulier hair and something hard and cold about the eyes. Now it was four years too late to match him and much too solid to exist anywhere outside his head―and more importantly, Bakura had seen everything end with his own eyes, watched the gold swallowed up by the void, ached every moment until he scarred over inside, moved away and away and away and tried to pretend it was the same as moving on, and thought he was finally beginning to understand how people stayed in orbit with each other without colliding or spinning off alone into the dark.

The thing that could not possibly have been the spirit regarded him through a bleary squint. "You cut your hair," it said reproachfully.

Bakura opened his mouth. A noise like something from a swanee whistle came out. 

With an annoyed grunt, the spirit braced itself on its good arm, planting its palm in a cluster of enamel shards, and landed hard on its backside as its feet slid apart on slicks of blood. Bakura hurriedly divested himself of his dressing gown and threw it over the bits of the spirit he least wanted to see.

The spirit hissed and batted at the dressing gown with its left arm. Its expression registered immediate regret. "Damned shoddy craftsmanship," it muttered, working its heels against the floor until it slid the few inches necessary to rest its back against a cupboard door. Fresh blood darkened the pale blue of the dressing gown. As the spirit raised its hand to suck the enamel from its palm, its gaze flitted disapprovingly over its surroundings. "Host, what the hell happened to your kitchen?"

"You did," Bakura replied. Something creaked in his brain as he padded closer to the spirit, mindful of the shrapnel littering the floor, and waited for it to vanish with proximity. It refused, even when he bent down at the waist and came close enough to hear its impossible breaths. "No, you can't have. You aren't real."

The spirit spat a shard at him.

Heart hammering, Bakura extended his forefinger and poked the spirit in the shoulder. He recoiled from solid flesh.

"Impressive, hmm?" The spirit flashed him a cocky grin before running its tongue over its bloodied teeth. "If I'd known this would be the result, I'd have sealed a piece of my soul into every last one of your appliances. You've heard of a one-man army?" Deranged laughter bubbled up its throat, then spiraled into a wail.

"My Ring!" The spirit's good arm grasped at its bare chest, then shot out and fisted Bakura's shirt. He had to grab the edge of the worktop to stop himself landing on the spirit. "What have you done with my Millennium Ring?"

Once upon a time its grip had been stronger than a steel vise, woven of magic and malice. Now the wounded thing on Bakura's kitchen floor evinced all the physical prowess of an underweight teenage boy. 

"Steady on," Bakura said, carefully prying its fingers from his pajama shirt. "I think your arm's broken."

The spirit howled and held on with redoubled tenacity. "Give me my Ring!"

"Can't and wouldn't." He finished freeing himself and straightened up. A too-hasty step backward sent a stabbing pain into his foot; grimacing, he raised his leg to pluck out the plastic as he continued, "Now quieten down, won't you? I'll ring for an ambulance if you promise not to attack anyone." 

The spirit bared its teeth. 

"Right, then. I'll try to make a splint." He tip-toed cautiously clear of the shards. "I'm going to get the first-aid kit. Don't go making yourself any worse."

It growled and hurled a jagged chunk of plastic at him.

In the bathroom, Bakura's reflection stared back at him from the medicine cabinet with resigned bewilderment. The kettle had been the only appliance to which he had any sentimental attachment, and he had felt inexplicably light-headed after managing to nick his palm on a crack in the handle the night before; he wished he could consider any of that coincidental. As he opened the mirrored door, catching the image of half the room in a quick arc, he noticed that the spirit had left little red splotches on his shirt. He stacked an extra box of plasters and a roll of gauze on top of the first-aid kit.

On his way back, he ducked into his bedroom long enough to work his feet into an old pair of trainers. A thump and a string of obscenities persuaded him to forgo tying the laces.

"I told you not to mess about," he said, bits of kettle crunching beneath his shoes as he crossed the kitchen floor. 

The spirit glowered at him from where it had almost managed standing. Its legs quivered, bleeding in clumsy spiderwebs, and its good arm was clamped tight over the edge of the sink. To Bakura's dismay, it had left the dressing gown on the floor.

With a long sigh, he deposited his supplies on the worktop and released the latch on the kit. "You haven't got any in your arse, have you? Only this will be easier if you're sitting." When the spirit didn't reply, he maneuvered one of his two kitchen chairs beside it. "Go on, then, sit down before you fall."

Expression dripping with disdain, the spirit edged over to the seat and lowered itself with as much dignity as it could muster. Its arm shook long after it had let go of the sink.

"Now hold still," Bakura said, draping the dressing gown over its lap. As he gathered up tea towels and his longest wooden spoons, he added, "I expect this is going to hurt―"

"Shut up."

As adept as Bakura had become at patching up the results of his own clumsiness and his body's misadventures without him, he hadn't broken any bones since his last year of primary school, when he had snapped two toes getting out of bed in the morning. He certainly hadn't ever been called upon to splint someone else's fracture. As he examined the spirit's swollen forearm, which was studded with bits of enamel, a feral vibration rose in its throat.

Once, a long time ago, Bakura had told his little sister a story to distract her from the sutures being sewn into her leg. He didn't think he could begin to enumerate the differences between his sister and the spirit. Biting his lip, he used tweezers to pluck out the shards in its wrist.

The spirit blanched. After a beat of ragged breaths and fluttering blinks, it rasped, "I'm not enjoying this."

"Well, I'm not doing it for laughs," Bakura replied. He soaked a wad of cotton wool in disinfectant to wipe the wounds, then wrapped the area loosely with a tea towel. As he tied the bowls of three spoon to the spirit's hand along what seemed to be the least tender path, he added, "You can pass out if you like."

"Go to hell, host." The spirit made a strained noise as he secured the handles in parallel halfway up its forearm. "Boil for all eternity in your own filth! May the Shadows flay you alive with a zester!"

In a better universe, Bakura would have been able to cram a lolly into its mouth. "Hush, you," he said, brushing the spirit's hair aside to tie a towel behind its neck as a sling. It growled long and low. "You're the one who didn't want to behave long enough to let a professional see to this." Pretending not to notice its venomous glare, he returned to the kit for more cotton wool.

"Where is my Ring?"

"Gone." 

Bakura ignored the spirit's snarl. When he plucked a thick shard from the spirit's shoulder, its good hand struck like a serpent at his wrist and bent his hand uncomfortably backwards. His demand to be let go was answered with a low hiss of "You're enjoying this."

"Right, there's nothing I'd rather be doing in the middle of the night than tweezing bits of my kettle out of you." Bakura pried its hand loose, then daubed disinfectant over the shoulder wound, which he deemed large enough for a plaster. The gauze he reserved for the deeper gashes in its legs.

Aside from a few bad patches, most of the shards were slivers, and most of the cuts proved minor once the blood was wiped away. The spirit sat stock-still, radiating loathing, unnerving Bakura with its warmth and breath and impossible solidness. The overhead light glinted from the growing pile of bloodied shrapnel in the sink.

By the time he reached the spirit's legs, the clatter of each new shard on the pile seemed to echo. A thick chunk of plastic lodged in the spirit's calf released an alarming amount of blood upon its removal and probably explained why the spirit had experienced difficulty getting to its feet. Staunching the flow required two tea towels. As Bakura half-mummified the area with gauze, he said, "You probably ought to drink some juice or―"

The spirit growled.

"Please yourself." 

He taped the end of the gauze, then lifted the spirit's foot to see how badly it had minced the underside. He hesitated as his fingers closed around its heel. "Was I really this scrawny?" Fascinated, he tilted the spirit's ankle back and forth in his hand. "I hadn't even grown into my feet yet." 

Most of the blood on its soles looked to have been picked up from the floor. When Bakura let go, the spirit thrashed so clumsily that he wasn't certain whether it was trying to kick him in the face.

Ignoring the invective spat after him, he got the orange juice from the fridge, poured a glass, and pressed it into the spirit's hand without letting go himself. "You're woozy," he said. "Stop being a prat about it. Drink this or don't, but if you throw it at me, you're on your own getting the rest of the kettle out."

Until that moment, Bakura had not realized it was possible to swallow orange juice with hostility. He could almost hear the spirit etching a new entry into its list of indignities for which to exact an especially gruesome revenge.

With a nod, he knelt again to resume patching up the spirit's bleeding feet. "I couldn't have weighed more than eight stone. No wonder I was always hungry."

The empty glass shattered at his side.

Bakura stiffened, then plucked out a sliver of plastic with minimal gentleness. "Remind me why you aren't bleeding to death outside, won't you?" Deciding not to look at the spirit's face, which he was certain would be unpleasant, he finished bandaging its foot and went to the cupboard to retrieve his broom. The bristles raked the blood on the floor into patterns that reminded him of a rock garden.

He had swept most of the shards into a pile when the spirit asked, flatly, "When did you cut your hair?"

Gratitude, of course, would have been too much to expect. As he angled the broom beneath the spirit's chair, Bakura replied, "It was the first thing I did when I got back from Egypt. Yugi and the rest were rather put off by it at first." He knew he was babbling and forged on regardless: "I told him my hair always does this when it gets above my shoulders, and then he got quiet and said they'd all moved on, and he seemed quite relieved when I didn't understand, though I've got a fair guess―"

Without warning, the spirit's good hand shot towards his mouth. 

Bakura narrowly deflected it with the broom handle, with which he then indignantly rapped its knuckles. "Did you really just try to slap me?"

"Enough!" The spirit snatched its hand back and gnashed its teeth. "Shut the hell up about that and answer the bloody question! How long ago?"

"Coming up on four years. Do that again and―"

"Four _what?_ "

Had he not tripped on his own untied laces, Bakura might have managed to dodge the spirit when it lunged from the chair. As it was, he found himself slammed against the refrigerator as the spirit grasped the collar of his pajamas and flew into a frothing rage. Fresh blood seeped through the gauze on its leg.

As he tried to wedge the broom between himself and the spirit, its rabid ululations evolved into words: "Lying insolent _traitor_ , return my Ring! Tell me where the pharaoh is! What have you done?" His leverage broke its grip but failed to push it away. "How dare you defy me? Where―"

Bakura jabbed it in the gut with the broom handle, winding it. The spirit favored its right leg as he half-steered, half-dragged it back to the chair. "Stop insulting me," he said on the way. "And don't you dare attack me again. I'll have you know that I am very close to remembering that I've got no reason whatsoever to help you. Don't sit yet." 

He picked up the dressing gown from where it had fallen. "You're going to wear this," he said, working the spirit's good arm through a sleeve. "I've had enough of seeing you starkers." The spirit cooperated like a molten cat.

Once he had tied the cloth belt, Bakura finally did up his shoelaces, then turned to retrieve his broom. The spirit caught him by the sleeve and said, "Do not try my patience further. Where is my―"

"Gone! I told you it's gone!" He tugged himself free and dropped his voice below a shout. "The Ring is gone, and so are the rest of the Items. It's over. It's been over for years. The pharaoh moved on after that plan of yours turned out to be complete bollocks, as usual. Hear that? He won, and you _lost_." Bakura hadn't meant to sound so vindictive, but he found he liked the taste of it. "You've missed your chance, so if you can't stop harping on about it, you might as well bung yourself back into what's left of the kettle."

A muscle twitched in the spirit's clamped jaw. Its voice came out tight with menace: "Then tell me where little Yugi is."

"Absolutely not. And regardless―" Bakura punctuated with taps against the worktop― "the pharaoh is gone. The Millennium Items are gone. It's _over_ , and there's nothing you can do about any of it."

The air between them crackled. Expression taut, the spirit rose and hobbled to the line where the linoleum met the hall carpet, where it bent to retrieve the bat.

Bakura got as far as "I say, what do you mean to―" before it clubbed him over the head.

* * *

He awoke to a throbbing headache and the inability to move his arms. The headache he understood, but it took Bakura a moment to work out that the spirit had used his spare sheets to tie him to one of the kitchen chairs. When he tried to wiggle loose, he found that the knots were tight enough to have numbed his hands. The part of him that didn't understand why he was awake at such an ungodly hour was impressed that the spirit had managed this with only one hand.

"About bloody time you woke up," said the spirit, grabbing Bakura's attention. It loomed over him with a notepad propped in its sling and a pen in its good hand; behind it on the kitchen table, Bakura's largest serrated knife gleamed in what must have been the position calculated to catch the most light. The spirit followed his gaze and sneered, an effect somewhat spoiled by the fact that it was still half-wearing a powder-blue dressing gown. "Now, I've made a list. You're going to provide me with the information I require, and then I'm going to kill you and steal your identity. Question One―"

"No, you aren't." Bakura's fingers fumbled indiscriminately against the knots and each other. "Why on earth would you tell me something like that if you really meant to do it?"

The spirit narrowed its eyes and slapped the pad down on the table. "Because, host, the thing about you―" its tone suggested that there were a great many things about Bakura, and this was merely the most immediately vexing― "is that you'll answer, and then you'll have the gall to look surprised when I slit you open like a fish. Why should I waste my time with pretenses?" 

Indignation snapped shut what Bakura hoped hadn't been a particularly piscine gape. "And that's your idea of a cunning plan, is it? My co-workers might notice when you turn up shorter and scrawnier, and they'll certainly suss when you can't do a macchiato."

The spirit frowned. "What the hell is it you do now, anyway?"

"I'm a barista." At the spirit's blank look, Bakura over-enunciated, "I make fancy coffees."

The frown returned. "A little swot like you isn't at university?"

"Of course not. My marks were abysmal." Hating that he sounded sheepish, Bakura added, "And my immigration status is a bit dodgy now, but I did manage to get a job, and St. Paul's teeming with universities, so I've considered―"

"Enough." If the spirit's eyes narrowed any further, it might as well have closed them. "We aren't in Domino?"

"No, _St. Paul_. Minnesota."

"What the bloody blue fuck are we doing in Minnesota?"

"Right now, losing feeling in our fingers." Bakura made his chair hop and scrape against the floor, a process through which his bonds held firm. His head continued to throb. "Can't we have this out when I'm not tied up?"

"You'll never feel them again." The spirit's cold, bright eyes fixed on Bakura's as it raised the knife, twisting the blade to scatter the light. For the first time in years, his scars twinged.

With a dry cackle, the spirit circled behind him, then reached across his chest to lay the flat of the blade over the old wound on his arm. "Do you really think I won't?" it whispered into his ear. The warmth of its breath made him shudder and regret having ever been unnerved by its absence. Breathing harder, the spirit traced the blade along his collarbone. "Do you really think you're still _necessary_?"

He raised his chin to keep the knife out of his peripheral vision. "That's a bit rich coming from you."

The knife halted. Bakura held his breath, which escaped in a squeak when the blade pressed against the base of his throat. His last several poor decisions projected themselves on the backs of his eyelids.

"I don't need you," the spirit rasped. "I never have. Take your wretched identity with you to the grave; there is nothing more I want from you."

"Then what _do_ you want?"

The knife flicked downward with enough pressure to sting. Only a hairline cut, Bakura could tell, but his breaths came in thready wheezes as the blade followed the trickle of blood under his shirt and ghosted a circle over his chest. When he tried to speak again, the spirit growled into his ear.

Slowly, the blade dragged itself back up his chest, over his shoulder, and down his arm, catching in the folds of his pajamas, until it reached his wrists. The sound of rending shot Bakura's heart into his throat. Fabric, he realized, not flesh―his best knife cut his second-best sheets into ragged ribbons. The spirit said nothing.

At the sound of the terminal tear he leapt up, nearly landing flat on his face as the blood rushed back into his extremities, and half-fell, half-ran to the knife rack, where he fumbled the handle of the largest remaining blade into his tingling fingers. He whirled to brandish it. "Drop the knife!"

A malevolent gleam lit the spirit's eyes. "Are you challenging me, host?"

"Your arm's broken," Bakura said as coolly as he could manage. His pulse pounded like a cataract in his ears. "And I'm bigger than you are, and you haven't got the Ring, so put that knife down right now before I have to hurt you."

Grinning madly, the spirit raised its weapon. "You haven't got the stones."

"We've established that neither have you."

The spirit's swipe took him by surprise. By sheer luck the blades met with a metallic shriek, and a swift kick to the spirit's shin bought Bakura enough time to scurry out of the kitchen and behind the coffee table. 

"We're not having a knife fight in my flat!" he shouted as the spirit limped into the living room. It chuckled darkly and ran its tongue over its teeth.

Perhaps asking what the spirit wanted had been a mistake, or perhaps it was the only reason that Bakura still had a pulse. Discerning the spirit's motives had been a hopeless task even when doing so had theoretically been within his power. The clock on the video taunted him with the impossibility of a good night's sleep.

The spirit used his moment of distraction to lunge, startling Bakura into sprinting back the way he had come to use the kitchen table as a more substantial barrier. The spirit skidded to a halt opposite him and began alternating feints to either side.

"Stop that! Seriously, now!" A feint to the left took itself seriously, and Bakura ran four laps round the table before the spirit settled into a holding pattern with him again. A slippery place under his shoe alerted him to the blood dripping from the spirit's calf. "If you pass out, I'll leave you on the floor, you see if I don't!"

With a bark of laughter, the spirit took a step back. Before Bakura could stop it, it sprang forwards and attempted to vault the table, an effort thwarted by both its gammy leg and its body's general lack of athleticism. He winced as the spirit's midsection collided with the edge of the table, and he held his breath for a moment as the spirit teetered between landing on its broken wrist and impaling itself on its own weapon. It ended up twisting sideways and stabbing a chair cushion on its way down.

Bakura snatched the knife while the spirit was still tangled up in its own legs. "Are you quite finished destroying my furniture?"

The spirit said nothing, and its hair obscured its face. Its three unbroken limbs quivered as it supported itself in the narrow space between chair and table, refusing to lean against either. Red soaked the gauze on its right leg.

Swallowing a surge of inappropriate pity, Bakura stashed the knives, along with every other immediately available sharp implement, in the oven. He glanced at the clock on the microwave, found it in cruel agreement with the one on the video, and took time out to swallow four tablets of paracetamol and wipe the blood off his chest and throat. It really had been a hairline cut; for once, he hadn't been scarred.

"Right, then," he said to the spirit, which still hadn't moved. "I'm going to have another go at your leg. Really you ought to have stitches, but I'd have to be mental to let you near anyone right now, and I wouldn't trust myself sewing skin. Go on, get up."

It did not. 

"Were you always this melodramatic, or is it just since you came over mortal?"

This earned him a noise that might have been the beginning of a snarl. When the spirit continued not to move, Bakura pulled it up into the chair, wondering again how he had ever been so thin, and watched it slump resentfully onto the table. It ignored him as he ruined another tea towel and expended a handful of butterfly bandages and half a roll of gauze.

Briefly Bakura considered taking the lock from his bicycle to secure the oven door, but his bicycle was five storeys down and critical to his daily commute. Better to take his chances with a demoralized evil spirit, he decided, than wager his sole means of transportation against his neighborhood's crime rate. The ashen cast of the spirit's skin suggested that it lacked the energy for further assaults.

Backing up to the boundary of the hallway, Bakura said, "You've had quite enough denial, and rather more than enough anger. You can't do bargaining because I'm going to bed. If you'd like to spend depression weeping quietly in the bath, that would be brilliant."

The miserable lump of hair and dressing gown did not acknowledge him.

"If you decide to kill yourself," he added, "do it outside and don't use any of my good knives. Don't drink the bleach, either; I need to do a wash tomorrow."

He hesitated with his hand on the light switch. When the spirit again failed to respond, he swore under his breath and sat down opposite it at the table. After a long silence he asked, "Would you like a cup of tea?"

The spirit's shoulders trembled. Despite the alarms pealing in the back of his mind, Bakura reached over to set a hand on its unbroken forearm and felt the spirit stiffen at the contact. "Please don't cry," he said. "I don't think I could get my head around it."

A rumble of annoyance issued from beneath the hair. When the spirit raised its head, it fixed him with a reassuringly dry-eyed glower. "Piss off."

"Are you hungry?"

"I should flay the flesh from your fingers and make you watch as I devour it, using your tears for salt."

"There are leftover sausages in the fridge."

Its glare did not waver.

"And buttercream icing."

After a stiff pause, the spirit straightened up in its chair. "Then stop nattering and make yourself useful."

Bakura opted not to engage it on the grounds that its comeuppance would arrive in the form of indigestion. After putting a pot of water on to boil, he selected a steak knife from the oven and set it in front of the spirit, along with a fork, the plate of sausages, and the bowl of icing. Any desire Bakura might have felt for a late-night nosh of his own faded.

The spirit scooped up a thick line of icing on the knife, narrowed its eyes, and lost most of the payload before it had closed the distance to the plate. It used the remainder to chase the nearest sausage, which rolled away from each pass of the knife. Bakura found himself fixed with a commanding glare that would have been more intimidating four years ago.

Now he only glared back and said, "I'm not going to ice your sausage for you."

With a low growl, the spirit slammed the tip of the knife into the table, then grabbed the bowl and moved to dump its contents. Bakura scrambled to catch the rim. 

"Fine! Let go! And stop putting holes in my table, you impossible―"

The spirit cut him off with a cackle that lasted longer than its lungs should have allowed. Its lips twitched as it yanked the blade free from the wood. With forced solemnity it said, "Ice my sausage," then broke into laughter again.

"I especially haven't missed your sense of humor." Bakura took the fork and used it to impale a sausage, which he mimed dipping in the bowl. At the spirit's disdainful look, he sighed, returned the sausage to the plate, sliced it apart lengthwise, and slathered either half with icing. The spirit watched expectantly as he did the same to the rest.

Bakura had scarcely pulled his hand away before the spirit stabbed the knife into the nearest sausage half, which it devoured with gusto. "You're welcome," he muttered as he got up from the table.

The spirit cackled, then went on eating loudly enough to be heard over the noise of pouring near-boiling water through a funnel. Bakura wondered whether he should feel relieved that its mood seemed to have improved. At least, he decided as he brewed his tea, its malevolent cheer didn't make his brain hurt.

By the time he sat back down at the table with a steaming mug of comfort, the spirit was polishing off the last of the sausages. "Tell me, host," it said, almost conversationally, "what happened to my diorama?"

"It was back in my living room when I came home." Bakura took a sip of tea. "I burned it."

A scowl tugged at the spirit's features. "Hence the new flat."

"No! Not like that, I mean." After another, longer sip, Bakura continued, "I took it apart bit by bit and threw it all in the skip, but I couldn't―I needed it to be _gone_. The landlord reckoned I'd done it, evidence or no, and anyway I couldn't stand to be there anymore, not after everything." He addressed his hands, which were still red where the sheets had cut into them. "This is my third new flat. They've all been rubbish because I haven't got a single good reference, but at least I've been able to put a bit of money aside every month. At first it was to see a therapist, but I gave that up as a bad job; there's no way to put it so it sounds possible, and they always tried to get me to come round to the idea that I'd made you up."

When the spirit didn't respond, Bakura looked up and saw that it had pulled the bowl closer to itself, dipped the knife in, and diverted its attention to licking off the icing. It met his expression with its tongue curled over the blunt edge of the blade.

"You're ignoring me," he said.

The spirit nonchalantly scooped up more icing. "You're whinging."

"You're an arse." Bakura wrapped both hands tight around his mug, letting the heat seep into his palms. His face tipped low enough to disturb the surface of the tea with his breaths. For several seconds he did not trust his voice. 

"You screwed me up," he said at last. "I'm still sorting myself back out." A flicker of movement drew his attention to the spirit's face. "Don't look proud of yourself!"

With a complacent chuckle, the spirit dropped the knife into the bowl of icing. It got up slowly from the table, keeping its weight on its better leg, and limped through a sticky section of the floor to the living room. As he followed, mug in hand, Bakura fought the urge to find out what it had done with the bat and bludgeon it senseless.

Just past the line of the carpet the spirit stopped short, bracing itself against the wall with its right hand. Bakura traced its glare to the framed photographs on the far end of the living room.

His muscles tensed, preparing to defend his décor from any impending apoplectic frenzies. The largest photograph he was especially keen to protect; it had been taken during the first summer after the world didn't end, back when he was just beginning to sleep through the night without pills and skirt the black hole of guilt inside his head. In the picture he was laughing, caked with sand and halfway to a sunburn, helping Yugi reinforce a sandcastle and blissfully oblivious of the bucket of seawater Joey was upending above his head.

Bakura hadn't forewarned them when he moved away within a week of finishing school, but he had sent them all postcards with his new address and telephone number. He was getting better.

The spirit's gaze flicked away from the photographs with more contempt than anger. It flopped down on the nearer half of the sofa and said, "I expect you burned my cards."

Adrenaline drained from Bakura's muscles in a rush that almost cost him his grip on his mug. "They were mine, and not all of them," he replied, settling in carefully on the opposite end. "Only the ones I know you used to hurt people." Change of Heart hadn't quite fit that category, but the smiling figure in the artwork, poised and pleased to be two people at once, had put knots in his stomach. The Man-Eater Bug and Morphing Jar went up in less sentimental flames. "I gave some of them to Yugi. I should have offered him Dark Necrofear―he didn't take a card at Battle City, and you jolly well should have told me that―but he would have refused. And anyway I didn't." Bakura didn't glance to his side, because he didn't want to know how the spirit was looking at him. "I kept the entire Destiny Board combo. I'm still rather proud of it."

"I should have won," muttered the spirit, in whose personal timeline Battle City was still a recent indignity. "One bloody card in the entire bloody deck and he bloody draws it."

Bakura nodded. "That's just what he does. Yugi's a good friend, but I'd never play Duel Monsters with him."

During the ensuing silence, he drank his tea and peeked at the spirit's leg to be sure it wasn't bleeding on the carpet. The spirit stared at the wall with an expression of diffuse displeasure, chin propped in its hand and eyelids drooping.

"You lied to me about him," Bakura said, becoming the immediate focus of the spirit's irritation. "About all of them, really. They kept asking me what was wrong until I finally told them. And they might have been with me all along if you hadn't―but there's blame enough to go round." He didn't say, _I don't think they even understand how much they should blame me for,_ because he'd promised Téa he wouldn't, ever again. Instead he added, "And the pharaoh really was going to forfeit to spare me."

The hand beneath the spirit's chin curled into a fist. Its face suggested that it had a great deal to say, no word of which would be pleasant or constructive, but in the end it only scoffed and flopped its head backwards on top of the sofa to direct a look of scathing displeasure at the ceiling. Bakura did the same thing himself at least once a week, usually when the upstairs neighbors seemed to be investigating the percussive potential of bowling balls.

After swallowing the last of his tea, Bakura continued, "They do tell me things when I ask. They explained three times what you got up to with the diorama, and somehow it made less sense every time, but they tried. I don't know why I ever believed a single word out of you."

" _You_ ," the spirit replied, with a leaden emphasis that implied much more than Bakura managed to infer. After a long pause it straightened its neck and neutralized its expression. "I might have come back to preserve you when the world ended. Or I might have come back to watch the shadows devour you from the inside out. I hadn't made up my mind yet when I was split off." Its lips curved ambiguously. "Either way, I would have come back."

It had taken Bakura the better part of a year to dislodge "no longer necessary" from the forefront of his mind, no matter how often he told himself that the spirit could contradict itself mid-sentence and be lying in both halves. He gripped his mug tighter and said nothing.

The silence was broken by the spirit's loud yawn. "Damned shoddy mortal flesh," it muttered, rising and wobbling towards the bedroom. Alarmed, Bakura followed and watched as the spirit sprawled itself over his bed, tangling its legs in the sheets. After a few twitch-kicks, it gave up trying to extricate itself and deflated into sleep.

It didn't look innocent―its lips curved maliciously even in slumber, and its fingers hooked like talons―but it did look vulnerable in a way that had little to do with the bandages and dressing gown. A lock of hair curled over its bare throat. For several seconds Bakura stood in the doorway, watching its chest rise and fall with shallow breaths. Still not a person, perhaps, but now it bled like one.

He tiptoed to the kitchen, eased the oven open as quietly as he could, and slipped out his sharpest knife. It felt heavy and absurd in his hand. After drifting a few half-hearted steps towards the bedroom, he sighed and put it back with the rest.

Blood encrusted the linoleum floor in bristle-raked rows and was smeared like fingerpaint on the cupboards. His broom looked as if it had been misappropriated as a murder weapon. The gory remains of the kettle littered the sink.

He considered ringing Yugi, but he couldn't script the conversation past "Hello, the evil spirit that tried to kill you and destroy the world just popped out of my kettle, wrecked my flat, and went for a kip in my bed. How's your tournament going?" Probably this was a conversation that didn't lend itself to scripting.

Instead Bakura put his jacket on and slipped out through the living room window onto the fire escape. Leaning against the least wobbly railing, he took his lighter and emergency cigarettes from his jacket pocket. Smoking had never cleared his head, but it at least obscured the congestion. When his hands stopped shaking, he took out his mobile and rang Téa.

"Are you busy?" he asked when she greeted him.

"I'm on my way to work. What's up?"

"Sorry to ring so late. Or early now, I suppose. I'm just..."

His silence must have served for the words he couldn't pull together; Téa sounded abruptly more alert as she asked, "What's wrong?"

"I reckon I'm making poor decisions again."

"About a boy? Because remember, we promised—"

"This is the year of Téa and Bakura, single people extraordinaires, figuring themselves out." Bakura smiled in spite of himself and breathed out a long curl of smoke. "I haven't forgotten. How are you getting on?"

"Don't change the subject from your bad decisions." Téa's tone was stern, but it softened as she continued, "It's getting better. Long distance was just too hard for both of us, you know? If we'd kept trying, we could have ended up resenting each other, and I don't ever want to lose him as a friend."

"That's good, then." Bakura couldn't imagine Yugi ever resenting her, but he certainly wasn't an expert on relationships. He flicked ash over the railing.

"So," Téa pressed, "how bad is this decision? Is it getting-back-together-with-Derek bad?"

"Entirely different level of bad, really. Téa, do you think—" he paused, turning sets of words over his head— "am I able to look after someone?"

"Oh my god, are you pregnant?" An awkward pause later, she cleared her throat. "Sorry, I mostly hang out with girls now. Um. Did you _find_ a baby?"

"No babies." He tried to laugh, but he could feel the sound turning into something else in his throat. "And it's not even... that wasn't even the right question, not at all. It's such a mess, I wouldn't know how to begin explaining it. I've rung you just to say 'never mind,' sorry, I'll just—"

Téa interrupted, "Don't hang up. It's okay." A car honked repeatedly in the background. "You don't have to explain it. Can you just tell me how you think it's going to end?"

"I don't know."

"Really?"

He was quiet for a moment, splaying his hand over his chest. "Probably not well."

"Are you safe?"

"Maybe?"

" _God_." Téa was quiet for several seconds. "Bakura, listen. You can get on a bus and call me when you get in, okay? I'll come find you at the station. You can sleep on my air mattress." When he didn't answer immediately, she added, "I know it's a long trip."

It had taken nearly two days to get from Domino to St. Paul; he wondered if the great sprawling tangle of highways led any more efficiently to New York. "It's not that. It's... well, I wouldn't want to impose."

"You're not imposing! I'm _inviting_ you. You're my friend. I miss you." Téa's tone lightened as she added, "Anyway, you bake. My roommates would love you."

Bakura filled his lungs up with smoke and breathed it out slowly, counting the seconds in his head. Traffic noises carried tinnily through the phone. Far below, something rattled in a skip. "I don't think I could bring much with me," he said at last.

"That's okay, we wouldn't have anywhere to put it." A car honked alarmingly near her. "You quit smoking, right? Aisha has asthma."

He hastily ground out his cigarette. "Yes."

"I'm so proud of you." The murmur of a crowd rose in the background. "Okay, I'm heading underground to catch my train. My shift's over at two, and then I'm gonna try to squeeze in a nap because I've got an audition later. But you can call whenever, okay? Leave voicemail and I'll call you back as soon as I can." To his noncommittally agreeable noise, she added, "You don't have to come all the way out here if you really don't want to. But you _have_ to take care of yourself. If I don't hear from you, I'll hop on a bus and find you."

She would, and he'd known she would when he chose to ring her. "I promise. Best of luck at your audition."

"Thanks. Don't forget how strong you are!"

Bakura returned his mobile to his pocket and tipped his aching head back to stare at the sky. Light pollution hid most of the stars, but the moon was more than half full, hovering just above the skyscrapers. It should have been more dramatic, he thought, full and red or an ominously sharp crescent. Crises always crept up on him without warning, at odd hours.

The photographs came easily enough from their frames. The stack of letters in his desk drawer joined his old deck in his jacket pocket. Nothing else seemed worth keeping; Bakura had a lifetime of experience in unlearning attachment.

For a moment he considered stealing into his bedroom to put on proper clothes, but crossing that threshold felt irrationally risky, and his prior adventures in cross-country bus rides had taught him that there was nothing like a dress code. His pajamas were comfortable, at least, and didn't have too much blood on them.

He set together on the table a twenty dollar bill, directions to the nearest hospital, and the keys to his flat. After four abortive attempts to write a note, he settled for "YOU'RE WELCOME."

His heart thundered all the way down the stairwell, and his hands trembled so badly that it took him over a minute to unlock his bike. Going back for his forgotten helmet was unthinkable, so he rode in a giddily reckless haze, hair whipping around his face. His knuckles strained white around the handlebar. He had nearly reached the bus station when the first pale hint of dawn lit the horizon, and his breaths finally came a little easier.

In the waiting room, he bought a cup of dreadful tea from a kiosk, and did not turn back.

* * *

[Sunday]

He didn't want to talk about it when Téa found him near the payphones at the station without any luggage, reeking even to his own nose of cigarette smoke and wearing pajamas that probably did have too much blood on them, after all. She hugged him anyway.

"Your hair looks nice like that," Bakura said, preempting the questions warring for priority on her face. "How did your audition go?"

She told him as they made a convoluted journey through the city's public transit system, and he listened, refusing to take any of the openings she left him. He still didn't want to talk about it when they stopped at a charity shop to buy him proper clothes that wouldn't make any of her roommates wheeze, nor when she steered him into a grotty curry restaurant after he took too long trying to work out when he'd last eaten. But on a wonky plastic chair, in a second-hand paisley jumper, over a cooling trough of chicken tikka masala, Bakura found himself saying, "I expect you're wondering what happened."

"Definitely. But take your time, okay? You look like you've had a really rough couple of days."

He nodded, worrying his lip between his teeth. Nothing about the last thirty-six hours could work its way past the older knots in his throat, so he lowered his eyes, clasped his hands in his lap, and picked at the worst of them: "It goes back rather farther than that. It's—back then, four years ago, before all that—before—when I took it back?" 

The disaster of a sentence did its job well enough for Téa to reply, "You mean when you took the Ring back? You've gotta stop beating yourself up over that."

"It didn't force me to. It couldn't have. It didn't have to." This was an old argument, one he never stopped having with himself. "I got myself so jumbled up."

She reached across the table to touch his arm. "Listen, I can't speak for everyone, but... Screw it, I _am_ gonna speak for everyone. We all could have done better. If you want to keep beating yourself up, you'll have to hit me, too." 

Bakura muffled a sob on his fist and was grateful that the restaurant's massive portions of middling curry hadn't attracted many other diners. "But I let it—"

"Stop trying to make it all your fault," Téa said firmly. "You can't blame yourself for things that were way bigger than you. Joey watching _Poltergeist_ the night before finals, _that_ was your fault."

A startled laugh slipped out of him. After pulling his arm away from her to wipe his eyes on his sleeve, he took a steadying breath and cleared his throat. "So when I rang you, it had just sort of incarnated itself using my kettle."

Téa nearly elbowed her dal makhani off the table.

Explanations came easier when Bakura could answer honestly with "I don't know." Blood and sentiment, he supposed, and beyond that the dread that the spirit hadn't lied about how entangled they were. Once he'd made it clear that the thing he'd left behind had significant injuries and no supernatural abilities and hadn't done him any serious physical harm, Téa sank into her chair and let out a very long breath.

"Your _kettle_ ," she said at length.

He nodded. "It was my mum's."

Shaking her head in bemusement, she slipped her mobile out of her purse. "Well, you're safe here. We should give everyone else a heads-up."

"I thought about that in the middle of Ohio. Or perhaps it was Indiana. After my mobile's battery ran out, at any rate." He began to shred a piece of naan with his fingers. "I thought about ringing my boss, too, to tell her I'd quit and that if I did show up for work, she ought not to let me near anything sharp, but I didn't tell it where I worked, and anyway I expect she sacked me on the dot of six."

Téa's thumbs danced over her mobile. "Don't worry about it. That guy's not in any shape to attack anyone, right?"

With a noncommittal noise, Bakura continued dismantling the naan. "It was in a right sorry state when I left it. I keep worrying about it and getting narked at myself for caring. I probably shouldn't even have patched it up. There's something very wrong with me, isn't there?"

She stilled her hands and looked up. "Sometimes I forget you weren't around when Yugi first put the Puzzle together. When Atem woke up, he was, well... You should talk to Yugi about it. I think it might help."

Yugi wouldn't have built the diorama, and Bakura couldn't see how anything wouldn't be overshadowed by that fact, but he only said, "Anyway, it's got food and a bed and directions to a hospital. If it's found my bills, it's got my phone number, too. I suppose I'll find out when I put my mobile on charge." He scraped at a burnt bit of the naan with his thumbnail. "I wonder if my flat's on fire yet."

"Like I said, my air mattress is yours. Bake something for my roommates and I bet you can get upgraded to the futon." Without breaking eye contact, Téa resumed typing. "When I told Wei about those brownies you made with the Cadbury eggs, she asked if you needed a green card marriage." She poorly stifled a laugh as Bakura dropped the remains of the naan into his lap. "Sorry, I didn't mean to freak you out! She was kidding. I think."

He huffed and bit into an oily samosa.

A few seconds later, Téa set down her mobile and said, "Okay, I texted Yugi, Joey, and Tristan and told them you're with me, so you're definitely not anywhere else, and they can call me tonight for details. Okay?"

He swallowed. "Okay."

She gave him an encouraging smile. "Then we can ask them to call around so everyone knows not to believe anyone pretending to be you, just in case. Who else do you think it might go after? Like, Yugi's grandpa, Mokuba..."

"Marik?"

"Oh, yeah." She wrinkled her forehead. "He's in Egypt, though. Could it even find him?"

Bakura popped the rest of the samosa into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. Four years later, he could still recall every digit of that astronomical phone bill; the spirit undoubtedly knew the number by rote. "I can't imagine so. Let's not bother him."

Téa's expression suggested that he hadn't entirely kept the vindictiveness out of his tone, but she only shrugged and put her mobile away. "Anyway, we'll take care of that tonight. I was just thinking we should pick up some tea for you. All we've got at the apartment is coffee and Snapple."

He shuddered. "Have you got a kettle? The last time I made tea, I had to boil the water in a pot, like a barbarian."

"We boil water in the microwave." When he recoiled, Téa laughed so hard that she snorted. "Don't worry, we can buy one on the way home. Hey, let me see your hand for a sec."

As Bakura complied, she dug through her purse for a black marker. With it she drew two curved lines on the back of his hand, then a curve and a wedge on her own. Baffled, he tilted his wrist in search of an enlightening angle.

Téa set her hand to the right of his, aligning the marks. "It'll make sense with the other three," she said. "Yugi will fly here as soon as his tournament's over, Joey drives in from Jersey practically every other weekend, and Tristan can take the train from Domino. So you won't have to wait long to find out. We've all missed you."

Bakura flexed his hand until Téa's rested gently on top of it. "Even though it's for weird, scary reasons," she added, "I'm really glad you're here."

His jumper itched and his chair wobbled, he was days away from his last decent night's sleep, the new life he'd been sleepwalking through was probably on its way to a smoldering ruin, and Bakura smiled more easily than he had in years. "So am I."


End file.
